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Max Vision, all-round good guy, was discarded back into an abyss. In his place, Iceman emerged – all-round bad guy, albeit one whose alter ego, Vision, had form as a collaborator with the Feds.

15

CARDERSMARKET

Iceman watched from the sidelines as the US Secret Service outsmarted the brains behind Shadowcrew. He considered himself apart from most of this tawdry team, which had sought to mug unsuspecting individuals on the Net while allowing itself to be eaten from inside by informers, snitches and rippers.

Now that Shadowcrew was finished and a number of wannabes had sprung up to replace it, Iceman resolved to show the world how you beat the law. Above all, he wanted to show his mastery of cyberspace and its users.

For Iceman, the carding sites were anarchic emporia where money was barely relevant and freedom to act was everything. He believed sincerely that creating special market places like his own new site, CardersMarket, where people could exchange information, should not be regarded as a criminal act in itself, even if it might inspire some of the traders to commit crimes. His and similar sites were a signal that the Web, in contrast to other areas of life, should not feel constrained by heavy-handed state interference, and on the home page he addressed the police and administrators of the Internet quite directly:

MSG TO LAW ENFORCEMENT, HOSTING, & ISPS:

CardersMarket is a legal forum provided as a place where members are allowed to discuss topics of their choosing. Absolutely NO illegal content is permitted and any illegal content is removed immediately by staff. Discussion is not a crime. Operating a forum is not a crime. There are no credit-card numbers, bank accounts, pornography, warez or anything that could be deemed illegal in the United States nor in the international community. Any alleged business that transpires between our members is not our business and if it happens it happens outside of our forum. We do not condone or in any way participate in illegal acts here.

The deeper he involved himself in the carding world, the more tangled he wove his moral web. As Iceman, he never bought and sold credit cards. But Vision created other online persona who did trade in them. The ability to section off parts of the personality was a common trait among hackers. At times Vision even appeared to believe that his virtual characters were autonomous in thought and deed, and therefore morally distinct entities.

As Iceman, he sought to defeat both his criminal competitors and the police in order to emerge as the unchallenged master of the carding world. This required a dual-pronged strategy. First, he must identify and expose all snitches (Confidential Informants or CIs) and cops who were stalking the carding boards. Second, he must vanquish the competition – all the other carding boards vying for criminal traffic.

Long before the US Secret Service successfully engineered the closure of Shadowcrew, Iceman had identified that several of its key members were either informants for American and Canadian law enforcement or, perhaps, full-blown police officers. Those like Iceman who practised deception knew they must be equally skilled in perceiving the art in others. Experienced cyber thieves and cybercops alike knew that nothing encouraged disguise and dissemblance like the Internet. Iceman reasoned that spotting snitches was an essential part of the job.

When Iceman did uncover informants, he wrote famously vitriolic rants about them on the boards. Some members concluded that Iceman did protest too much. Was it possible that the master brain of CardersMarket was himself an informant? It certainly looked that way as he launched his master plan for annihilating the competition – a series of attacks on rival carding forums, aimed both at taking them out and absorbing their voluminous member databases into his own CardersMarket. Vision was quite open about his intentions: with his hallmark arrogance, he