DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [20]
At this point, Dimitry disappeared, along with some of his more outrageous money-making schemes. Some months later he emerged from a chrysalis conferring anonymity as Script, a gloriously adept creature that flitted excitedly between two new websites, carder.org and carder.ru. These were little more than discussion forums where Russian hackers chewed the digital cud about how it might be possible to access the gazillions of dollars, pounds, yen and euros locked away behind credit cards. One of the original members of these sites remembered them as ‘desultory, unstable’ and ultimately ‘unrewarding’.
Script, however, thought long and hard. If you had websites for all other manner of commerce, why not develop one for the inchoate trade in stolen credit-card numbers, bank accounts and other valuable data? He had a compelling motive for wanting to establish such a presence on the Web. For Script himself had begun to accumulate large amounts of these data, which he had neither the time nor the resources to exploit. He wanted to turn all his numbers into cash. He wanted to sell.
The timing was perfect. In the preceding five years, the Internet had hosted a furious growth in commercial activity. Nobody had fully anticipated this, because its originators had envisaged the Web as a tool to improve and accelerate communication, an arena where ideas and gossip could be exchanged.
Amazon, eBay, lastminute.com and other first movers of the cyber enterprise world came out of left field. But their success did not go unnoticed. Thousands upon thousands of people tried their hand at setting up websites. This being one of those historical moments that emerge once in a generation, and where human greed and fantasy coincide, it was not long before banks and venture capitalists convinced themselves that e-commerce was a guarantee of quick riches. They began pouring money into these companies, the great majority of which were intrinsically worthless entities despite having been capitalised to the tune of millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars. The first major bubble of the globalised age had begun, and how fitting that the bubble was in high-tech stocks.
But while most dot.com companies were indeed commercial Potemkin villages, firms already well established in the real world found that there were distinct advantages to conducting part of their business on the Web.
Banks were swift out of the traps in this regard because, as already noted, it dawned on them that if they could persuade their clients to make payments and manage their accounts online, then they would not have to pay employees to do so. Those customers who felt comfortable with the Web were almost certain to prefer the close control over their finances that Internet banking enabled.
At this time the Masters of the Universe, the new class of financial capitalist, were casting off the fetters that had in the past restricted their speculative activity on derivative markets. Essentially, politicians in Washington and London had issued them with a licence to gamble (the dot.com boom was a fine example) and, as the price of assets that were worth very little rose to great heights, money was lent on the supposed value of those assets. For a decade the Western world was bathed in cheap credit. The Ages of Empire and Capital morphed into the Age of Plastic.
Personal credit-card debt in the four biggest users of plastic – the US, the UK, Japan and Canada – started rising manically in the mid-1990s. In the space of ten years from 1997, the number of cards in circulation worldwide rose from just under 1.5 billion to 3 billion, and average individual debt among the most addicted users, the Americans, doubled from $5,000 to $10,000. Banks adored our new-found affection for credit cards because at a time of virtually 0 per cent interest rates, they were still gaily charging anywhere between 5 and 30 per cent. In Britain the head of Barclaycard confessed to a parliamentary Select Committee that he did not ‘borrow