DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [63]
Although a youngster compared to the US Postal Inspection Service, the Secret Service has the longest history in fighting cybercrime. The US SS was formed in 1865, not to provide armed protection for the President – that was one of Congress’s central responses to the assassination of President McKinley in 1901. The original and abiding purpose of the agency was to detect, investigate and then seek the prosecution of anybody found manufacturing or dealing in counterfeit currency. Soon after it was established, Congress also charged the agency with investigating financial fraud.
In the wake of the Second World War, the Bretton Woods agreements established the United States as the undisputed leader of Western economies and the dollar as the chosen reserve currency in the capitalist world. Although the Soviet Union and China rejected the dollar’s supremacy, both communist superpowers were nonetheless eager to accumulate as many greenbacks as possible. In a world where most governments kept a tight rein on foreign-exchange flows across their borders, the ubiquity of the dollar as a form of payment greatly increased the attraction of issuing counterfeit US currency.
The result was an internationalisation of the Secret Service’s operations, as crooks and governments around the world sought either to enrich themselves or to undermine American power by printing their own dollar bills. Wherever you are reading this, you can be fairly confident in the knowledge that there is a Secret Service operative in a nearby location. But while the agency has a long arm, there are nooks and crannies that not even it can reach – in the 1990s, for example, the superdollar spread around the world. The US government believes that these batches of fabulously accurate but nonetheless fake $100 bills emanated from printing presses in North Korea – one of the few areas that are off-limits to the Men in Black.
Taking a bullet for the Prez and chasing dodgy dollars are tough enough jobs, but in 1984 Congress requested a further expansion of Secret Service activity to include the investigation of credit- and debit-card fraud, counterfeit documents and computer fraud.
Over the next two decades the organisation that is, by some way, the most secretive American law-enforcement agency developed a specialisation in cybercrime, leading to an operational capability second to none. But the Secret Service employs only 6,500 people. The FBI, by contrast, is almost 30,000 strong. More recently, the US SS has been absorbed into the Department for Homeland Security, which has wounded its pride. There is no love lost between the two agencies. Whether this is due to the Secret Service’s inferiority complex or the FBI’s superiority complex is hard to tell – it’s probably a bit of both. Either way, they have a history of niggling disputes, which impact on major operational issues.
After the Shadowcrew takedown, the Secret Service decided to nurture a relationship with Dron, who had joined DarkMarket in late 2005, where his reputation as a seller of skimming machines grew so rapidly that he soon established his own website, www.atmskimmers.com. For many months the Buffalo office of the Secret Service toiled to establish Dron’s whereabouts. The vendor was using the Israeli email service Safemail, because he knew that the company blocked the sender’s IP address, which meant that the recipient could not track him down. The Secret Service finally got its break in January 2006 when Safemail agreed to release Dron’s IP addresses after the US SS’s request had forced its way through Israel’s dilatory criminal-justice system. Dron, it turned out, was using a variety of computers located throughout the Calgary area in Canada’s oil-boom province, Alberta.
The next eighteen months