DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [40]
One evening, he told the tale of his lost Amex money to one of the many itinerant surfers he met on the Net and his IRC channel. ‘Go check amexsux.com,’ his contact said, ‘it’ll make you feel better, if nothing else!’
Renu loved the new site (logo: DO leave home without it), where former clients of American Express poured out their anger at perceived wrongs. The animus felt towards this particular company is fairly extensive, as a Google search testifies: there are hundreds of sites dedicated to bitching about Amex, many of which post a fairly impressive set of links to negative news stories featuring the company.
One poster on the message board offered an original idea to those who felt they had grievances against the company. ‘Take your revenge! Go to CarderPlanet.com!’
As Renu set sail in search of CarderPlanet, he felt it was time to bid farewell to his own personality. He became JiLsi, whose avatar was the face of a mischievous cartoon pirate with a red hat and a black patch over his left eye. A veritable Captain Jack Sparrow amidst the cyber Caribbean, he soon felt at home among the scurrilous crew of hackers, crackers and fraudsters when at last he weighed anchor on CarderPlanet. Somewhere among this group of misfits wandered Matrix, and although it was a few months before they exchanged the vows of virtual friendship, the two became familiar figures floating between the myriad sites that sought to emulate CarderPlanet.
Where else might you find a drug-addicted refugee from Sri Lanka hanging out with a strait-laced middle-class German teenager, hosted by a charismatic Odessite with a vision for a new Ukraine? Only on the Web.
13
SHADOWLANDS
New York, New York, 2003–4
RedBrigade decided that the time had come to hit Washington Mutual – in his eyes, nothing more and nothing less than a purveyor of free money. The bank had actually lost its mutual status in 1983, and now its CEO had announced that he intended this venerable institution from Seattle to become the ‘Wal-Mart of banking’. Strip it down wherever you could was the boss’s philosophy. Shift those loans and don’t look too closely at the customers’ assets, liabilities and wages. Move those sub-prime mortgages, package ’em up. Invest as little as possible in staff and equipment. This was low-cost banking with all the frills cut out. Fortunately for RedBrigade and his pals, the frills included elementary security systems.
He left the Four Seasons Hotel on 57th and 5th Streets at around eleven in the morning. His head was still groggy from the previous night’s partying, but as it was vintage champagne and almost uncut cocaine, he felt fully combat-operational.
On reaching the bank, he casually strolled up to the untrained teller (‘they didn’t have to pay ’em as much’) and passed over the WaMu debit card.
‘How much would you like today, sir?’
‘Ten thousand, please.’
‘Alrighty!’
Tip-tap, tip-tap. Here at WaMu, RedBrigade had to hand over his card to the teller, who would then swipe it through a point-of-sale device. In any other bank this is the moment when the teller might be reading a coded message on their screen telling them to ‘call in immediately’. RedBrigade would have to scrutinise the teller’s face. Is she rumbling me this minute? Should I run? Or do I just stand here like an imbecile and wait for the cops to turn up? Maybe there’s nothing wrong at all and I’m being paranoid?
Not at WaMu. Those cheapskates didn’t want to waste money on computer screens and coded security messages. So if the card was rejected in this establishment, RedBrigade would just look slightly surprised, apologise and walk off. Nobody called in the cops at WaMu.
But his cards never were turned down. On this December day in 2003 the lady swiped his card and it was approved straight away. He then signed a printed-out receipt with a transactional code on it, before walking to the machine at the front of the bank. In went the code. A momentary