DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [62]
It wasn’t long before cold turkey kicked in. JiLsi had never known such a painful downward spiral. His entire life had been snatched away from him – or at least the only thing that really meant anything to him. He was angry, hurt and upset. Who had done this, and why? His response was to lose himself in the anaesthetic qualities of Martell chased by a pipe of crack. The pain receded for an evening and a night, but he awoke to a misery more intense than the previous day.
JiLsi finally managed to establish icq contact with Cha0. The chat left him reeling. ‘We know you have been working for Scotland Yard and the High-Tech Crime Unit,’ Cha0 told him. ‘Your decision to rat on Iceman was the ultimate proof. We know that you are working with law enforcement. You have been excluded from all sites.’
JiLsi was speechless. Everything he had worked for had disappeared in an instant, and now he was the fall guy. What next? Where to? Despair and drift, JiLsi, despair and drift.
Part V
21
THE DRON LEGACY
Calgary, Alberta, 2006
From his early days advertising on Shadowcrew, Dron had always received the warmest reviews for his work. ‘I received Dron’s skimmer yesterday afternoon,’ one satisfied customer posted on DarkMarket. ‘Spent the evening testing it and am very, very impressed. Dron has got a first-rate product here, one that’s well worth your time and money.’
Dron had been as good as his word. ‘Shipping was fast. The packaging was discreet,’ the poster continued. But it wasn’t the efficient dispatch of goods that made Dron so popular, it was the aftercare service he provided that ensured clients came back for more. ‘Now, customer service, for me, that’s really where Dron comes through. He sent updates to his buyers on a regular basis and when I emailed with my concerns or questions, I invariably had a reply within twenty-four hours. Pretty damn impressive.’
Thanks in large part to the Internet, the culture of consumer rights and expectations has finally filtered through into the criminal world. If a criminal was shafted by a vendor on the Internet, it would be difficult to track the offender down and deploy the traditional method of expressing one’s unhappiness at shoddy service – physical violence. Instead, criminals selling illegal wares over the Web have to compete by offering the best service.
In another age, Dron would have risen swiftly to the top. He may have left school at fifteen, but he combined this entrepreneurial flair with a creative streak. It was after his father had taught him how to play the stock market on the Internet that he came across the criminal bulletin boards and, as a twenty-four-year-old, signed up to Shadowcrew, DarkMarket’s most successful predecessor, in the spring of 2004.
But his greatest skill lay in an innate engineering ability. From scratch, he taught himself how to design and build skimmers that fitted the two most popular ATMs around the world. These were complicated and intricate devices and worth every penny of the $5,000 he charged for each one (discounts offered on bulk sales, naturally). Not only would he respond to queries from customers, but he dispatched each product with an instruction manual, the appropriate software and a free USB cable.
His library also revealed how seriously he took his job. Alongside Document Fraud and Other Crimes of Deception stood Holograms and Holography and Secrets of a Back Alley ID Man. But perhaps his most important volume was Methods of Disguise. When dropping into one of his home town’s many Internet cafés in order to manage his sales and marketing over the Web, Dron would generally wear a black baseball cap and black jacket. But for his forays into the post office, or when he was cashing out a credit card as payment for one of his skimmers, he would prefer a red cap and blue windcheater.
The United States Secret Service had first spotted Dron as a significant presence on Shadowcrew. Of course, the administrator on Shadowcrew, Cumbajohnny, was an informant for the Secret Service. But Dron did not belong to