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Dovzhenko Street lies two miles south of Odessa’s city centre. The streets are lined with trees and it is counted among the city’s more fashionable addresses. Golubov was living at his grandmother’s apartment, so when Popov and his team pitched up they were surprised to find a thick steel door blocking their access. After moving into position, Popov signalled to his colleagues. ‘Open up! Police,’ they shouted while banging on the immovable door. Greeted by silence, they strained to hear anything behind the steel barrier – one of them thought they detected some shuffling, but despite their efforts, the door remained firmly barred.

As Popov was wondering whether to call in some heavy equipment, the sharp smell of burning paper hit their nostrils. ‘Christ!’ he thought, ‘he’s started destroying evidence!’ Popov lost no time in alerting the emergency services, and before long a fire engine was on its way. With the heat intensifying, the firemen smashed open a hole in the apartment wall and started to spray foam through it. When it looked as if his grandma’s apartment was about to be flooded by industrial chemicals, Golubov finally decided the game was up and at last opened the door.

It was a bizarre scene. Not only did Popov discover Golubov’s records on fire, but the hacker was feeding computer disks through a Raskat. Had Golubov merely deleted files from his various computers, this would have presented little challenge to anyone with rudimentary skills in computer forensics seeking to reconstruct them. You can burn paper – it is much harder to burn computer files. But the Russian-designed Raskat could deploy powerful electromagnetic waves in order to obliterate data completely. Golubov had been caught red-handed, and Popov accompanied him to Kiev where he was incarcerated.

Vega and Golubov were now both under lock and key (as were several other vital members of CarderPlanet’s family). Both strenuously denied that they are Boa and Script. Neither has yet been convicted of a crime – indeed, the former has spent seven years in American jails without ever having gone to full trial, raising serious questions about the efficacy of the US criminal justice system.

Whatever the precise cause, the stuffing had been knocked out of CarderPlanet. The visionary website for hackers and crackers may have disappeared but its legacy was immense – it has revolutionised criminality on the web.

Furthermore, large-scale cybercrime had already broken out of its Ukrainian origins. In the final two years of CarderPlanet the administrators had encouraged the development of an English-language forum that had been running alongside the Russian discussion boards. This forum spread the Spirit of Odessa to hackers and carders the world over. Two of its members were novices, but they were intrigued by the new world of professional carding. One had adopted a jolly pirate as his avatar and the other an image from many geeks’ favourite film: enter JiLsi and Matrix001.

Part III

9

TIGER, TIGER

Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1988

Bang! Bang! Bang!

‘Open up! Open up!’

Soldiers in this mood rarely wait for an answer, particularly not at half-past five in the morning. They smashed against the door with their rifles and poured into the house. Searching from room to room, they ordered family members to lie on the floor before ransacking the place.

Three youngsters woke in terror as their home filled with noise and light. ‘Out of bed! Out of bed!’ Sweating in the tropical heat with nothing but their underwear on, the children found that their teeth started chattering with fear. The soldiers pulled out the eldest, just eleven years old, and pointed to a patch of white skin the size of a hand on his stomach. ‘What’s this? What is this?’ they shouted almost triumphantly. ‘He’s been using explosives!’

‘It’s a birthmark,’ he replied, ‘it’s just a birthmark.’

They pulled the boy away and sat him on a chair in the living room before beginning the interrogation. His parents and his grandmother