DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [29]
In late February 2003 Roman Vega was returning from a business trip to his home in Malta when one of his friends asked him to drop off and see him in Nicosia, Cyprus. He spent an evening drinking and reminiscing with his pal about their adventures in Burma in 1991 when they were part of the team that sent the first ham-radio broadcast from the military-run state.
On returning to his room at the Hotel Castelli, Vega had an unpleasant surprise awaiting him in the form of Modesto Poyiadjis, a local police inspector, who promptly arrested the Ukrainian as an accessory to a credit-card fraud perpetrated by another Ukrainian guest whom Vega had allowed to stay in his room (a bad move, as it turned out). For Vega, it was the beginning of a relationship with law enforcement in Cyprus and the United States that can only be described as Kafkaesque.
After Poyiadjis had checked through the Interpol records, he made contact with Greg Crabb, the lead officer in the US investigation of Boa. He told the man from the US Postal Inspectorate that he believed Roman Vega was none other than Boa. Crabb could barely contain his excitement. Even before the call was over, in his mind he was booking the first flight to Nicosia. It was not just the prospect of attempting to extradite one of the masterminds behind CarderPlanet … they had his laptop! If the Cypriots had managed to work out who his alter ego was without really knowing what they were dealing with, just imagine what an investigator like Crabb could extract from that hard disk.
‘Boa’s arrest came as a huge shock,’ said the CarderPlanet member Xhora, echoing what many of his cyber compatriots on the Planet felt at the time. Boa had been the man who had made CarderPlanet fun, as well as interesting and lucrative. Because he was that much older and more experienced than the rest of the Planet’s inhabitants, many assumed that he would be invulnerable to inconveniences like law enforcement.
At the same time, Script was accumulating ever greater power and cash as a result of his control over CarderPlanet. ‘His interviews were designed to make the site more popular and to increase his business,’ said another CP devotee, Null _ Name, ‘and in this he succeeded. There was a flood of new members into the site. And the atmosphere changed. It was not the same.’
The cosy camaraderie of CarderPlanet’s early days was, it is true, fast disappearing. Nonetheless the website was generating more money than ever. The English section of the forum was now up and running, and before long carders from all over the world were signing into the site. But in far-away San Francisco, Greg Crabb was feasting on Boa’s hard disk, mining it for the thousand secrets that had passed back and forth between Boa and Script. ‘I never needed to interview Boa,’ said Crabb, ‘I’m not even interested in what the guy has to say because I had his hard disk – there was nothing new he could tell me!’
In fact, Crabb may not have mined the computer for everything he wanted. It seems that at some point, US law enforcement cracked one of the encryption systems on the VAIO laptop, but its owner had also reinforced it with a powerful system, Handy Bits EasyCrypto (downloadable for free), which would have prevented access to about 80 per cent of the computer files.
On the carder forums, bitterness lingers to this day because members assumed that Roman Vega had ratted on Golubov. This is untrue – any intelligence on