DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [60]
It had been more than two years since the Shadowcrew bust and a sense of complacency had also set in. The ‘lone wolves’, who now comprised a minority on the boards, never let their guard down. They took care not to incriminate themselves. Recka, the fraud king from Sweden, scrupulously avoided the trade in American credit or debit cards, as this would place him squarely in the sites of US law enforcement; the Swedes and other Europeans he could handle, but he was careful not to poke the Americans in the eye.
But many of the carders, especially the younger ones, were lax in their security, eschewing the use of encryption in their icq chats and failing to maintain proper VPN and tunnelling systems to mask their IP addresses. In Pittsburgh, however, Mularksi was steadily building a database with a program of his own design, which was able to cross-reference the activities of individual carders – he was reading their messages, logging their icq and IP addresses and, where possible, linking these to E-Gold accounts.
Unbeknownst to the users of this digital currency facility, government agencies had enjoyed full access to the records of E-Gold, the carders’ favourite method of transferring money among themselves, since February 2006. This followed the arrest of its founder, Douglas Jackson, in Florida on suspicion that the service was being used for money-laundering. Few (if any) of the cyber criminals, though, had put two and two together with respect to E-Gold. Russians eschewed such Western-based companies, registered in Belize, preferring WebMoney instead, based in Moscow beyond the reach of Western law enforcement.
Armed with this growing body of evidence, Mularski made contact with the police in a number of European countries as autumn turned to winter in 2006. He talked to the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) in the United Kingdom, to the Federal Police in Germany and, later on, to the regional force in Baden-Württemberg.
He also approached the OCLCTIC in Paris, the recently formed and prosaically named Central Office in the Struggle Against Information and Communication Technology-related Crime. The reception he received here was a touch chilly. The French police are generally keen to cooperate with the United States, especially in the areas of terrorism and cybercrime, but traditional suspicion of America and its intentions in Europe still runs deep in French society. Any government that appears to be cosying up to the US is in danger of losing electoral brownie points, and so it cautions its organs to be circumspect in their dealings with Washington agencies.
The boss of OCLCTIC, Christian Aghroum, thought it ridiculous that every time he and his officers sought the assistance of a company like Microsoft, they ran the risk of an outcry, containing predictable accusations of the police being in the pocket of giant American corporations. The fact was, Aghroum knew, that you couldn’t really start combating cybercrime unless you had a degree of cooperation with companies like Microsoft. Articulate, and a shrewd analyst of the political minefield that surrounds international policing, Aghroum was resigned to the fact that neither politicians nor the public in France had any idea about cybercrime and what you need in order to defeat it. Most French people seemed to harbour the illusion that you can combat and contain transnational crime from within your own borders, especially if the