DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [42]
One thing kept bugging him. He had too much cash. One evening he came home with $77,000 in his pocket to add to the $300,000 already lying about the apartment. There was also $110,000 worth of money orders. RedBrigade had set up a global cash-out operation, so he would supply the card and account data to an East European middle man, who would organise the raids on ATMs before sending RedBrigade the cash. For that operation he had to start banking again himself. He was tired of trying to stay under the Reporting Guidelines – any transaction of more than $10,000 had to be registered with the Treasury under anti-money-laundering rules. Shit, he thought, who would have known how difficult it could be to get rid of money!
He was preparing another cash-out of $77,000. It would have been a simple stroll for a few blocks from his apartment, and then he thought, ‘I’ve got so much money here, I can’t be arsed.’ He knew there was something very wrong with the whole picture. But the only thing that kept going through his mind was: ‘CarderPlanet was one thing, but who would ever believe this Shadowcrew shit? Who would believe that I can walk into banks, day in, day out, and exit with fifty grand in my pocket? It’s insane!’
When CarderPlanet finally closed down in 2004, it boasted not just the Russian- and English-language forums, but had added Korean, Chinese and even Arabic sections. ‘CarderPlanet was a game-changer,’ said E.J. Hilbert, a former FBI Special Investigator who spent several years on the investigation into the website, ‘all the successors to CarderPlanet took the site as their model. It is no exaggeration to say that it spread the practice of criminal hacking to all four corners of the globe.’
Websites modelled on CarderPlanet sprang up everywhere: theftservices.com, darknet.com, thegrifters.net and scandinaviancarding.com. There were many more, including one bound by the delightful acronym parodying American academic communities, IAACA (International Association for the Advancement of Criminal Activity).
But none succeeded like Shadowcrew during its two years of existence. And RedBrigade was one of the many carders on Shadowcrew who hit the jackpot. Law enforcement was just beginning to become aware of the extent of the business. Banks were effectively clueless, ordinary folk oblivious.
Hackers were streets ahead, and Mammon ruled everywhere – the hedge-fund managers, the oligarchs, the oil sheikhs, the Latin American mobile-phone moguls, the newly empowered black economic elite in South Africa, the old white economic elite in South Africa, Chinese manufacturers of global knick-knacks, techno gurus from Bangalore to Silicon Valley.
Hundreds of carders made vast fortunes during Shadowcrew, many of them sufficiently naive to piss it all away on the trappings of arriviste wealth. In those days there were no checks on your computer’s IP address when you made purchases over the Web. There was no Address Verification System on the credit card: you could ship goods anywhere in the world (except Russia and other former Soviet countries), regardless of where the card was issued, and nobody would cross-check it at any stage.
This novel crime took root well beyond its Ukrainian- and Russian-language nursery. It began to globalise spontaneously. RedBrigade recalled how established Asian criminals would now communicate with college kids from Massachusetts who were talking to East Europeans, whose computers overflowed with credit-card ‘dumps’. Behind some of the nicknames on Shadowcrew were criminal agglomerates like All Seeing Phantom, revered among his peers.
A good ten years older than most Shadowcrew members, RedBrigade saw no advantage in gaining recognition and respect by attempting to climb the hierarchy. He failed to see why ordinary members were in such awe of the moderators and administrators of the boards. Despite its success,