DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [48]
His relentless use of DDoS attacks ensured that Iceman was widely loathed among the criminal hacking community for his arrogance. But his tactics also aroused the suspicion that he was working for the Feds, because so many of his victims were hackers and criminals.
However, nobody could argue with his figures and turnover, as CardersMarket now had several thousand members, all of them still active, buying and selling credit cards, bank accounts, viruses, identities and more. By August 2006 he was cock of the cyber walk.
There was only one thorn in his flesh. One criminal website wouldn’t die. Every time he hit it, whether by clearing out its database and wiping all its files or by ordering his army of zombies to take it down from the Web, it just kept coming back like a weeble, those funny dolls that always spring back up when you knock them down.
The battle with DarkMarket had begun.
16
DARKMARKET
Cyberspace, 2005–8
As the souped-up car rolled down the western edge of the Alps, the sun bounced off the crisp Mediterranean, reinforcing the sense that this was going to be a stupendous weekend. The group of twenty-something Scandinavian lads led by Recka, the king of Sweden’s carders, turned off the A8 and onto the Grande Corniche highway before snaking down through the mountains to Monaco.
One of the smallest and most densely populated countries in the world, the principality had been drowning in its own glamour for most of the last century. In 1956 it set a gold standard for post-war global celebrity hysteria when one of Hollywood’s most alluring princesses, Grace Kelly, joined a real royal family by marrying Crown Prince Rainier, heir to the Monégasque throne.
Now, exactly fifty years after Monaco’s marriage of the century, a group of DarkMarketeers armed with a trove of rare plastic booty were preparing a brief raid on this temple of decadence. Soon after passing the border from France to Monaco, the first casinos hove into sight. These cash factories have been underwriting the principality’s budget since the 1860s. The locals call them ‘Monaco’s wallet’ and they are the reason why the Monégasques pay no taxes. Why would they need to? A single room at the Monte Carlo Bay Hotel, for example, costs $800 a night, and if the guests can afford that, they can obviously throw silly money into the casino vaults. The result – a surfeit of lucre all round.
The indigenous population thus bathes gently in the huge pools of money which the super-rich fritter away on the blackjack and roulette tables. Guest residents often feel able to dispense with this cash so lightly because it’s money that, under other circumstances, they would be paying in tax to those national exchequers where they or their businesses spend most of their time. As Monaco is a haven for tax evasion – and, according to the venerable Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, money laundering too – the authorities on this rocky outpost of fiscal freedom are used to not asking questions of visitors to their tiny land or the origins of their funds.
A perfect place, then, for a group of DarkMarketeers armed with twelve American Express Centurions, the fabled Black Amex cards, Olympian deities in the Age of Plastic who grant audiences by special invitation only to squillionaires from the West, Japan, Hong Kong and the Middle East. In America, the Centurion user has to pay a $5,000 joining fee and then subsequent annual fees of $2,500. But in exchange, Centurion Man receives free plane tickets, dedicated concierge services, personal shoppers and membership of elite clubs dotted discreetly around a world of which we inhabitants of Planet Drudgery have no notion.
And did we talk cash? Present your Centurion and swaddle yourself in the bucks, euros, sterling, Swiss francs or yen that the bank cashier will hand over with a hint