DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [65]
Matrix decided he should consult his fellow DarkMarket administrators and a couple of other confidants. What, he asked, did they all make of this? Their replies were oddly bland, in some cases almost indifferent, mere warnings for him to keep an eye out.
In Pittsburgh, Keith Mularski felt anything but indifferent. The email extracts that he and the others had received from Matrix meant only one thing: the operation was being leaked. And if it was being leaked to Matrix, who else was being tipped off? The timing could hardly be worse, as for several months the FBI had been planning the first wave of DarkMarket arrests. It was bad enough having to deal with an uncooperative Secret Service. The German police from the federal state of Baden-Württemberg (LKA) had heard that their French colleagues were preparing a DarkMarket related bust, but the French police had snubbed them, saying that their presence at a planning meeting in Paris with Britain’s SOCA and the Secret Service would be unnecessary.
The anonymous hushmail sent to Matrix001 triggered an anxiety among the investigating police forces that would linger for many months. They needed to know whether the leak was a result of carelessness or an inside job, or indeed whether a hacker had penetrated one of the investigating teams’ computer networks. Every time something went wrong, the suspicion that there was a traitor among the ranks bubbled up to the surface. Morale could not help but suffer.
Mularski’s attempts to coordinate the first arrests were proving difficult. The fear for any cybercop is that, if one fraudster is taken in without the others, news will spread like wildfire across the boards that something bad is going on and targets will simply disappear. Hence the Secret Service’s obsessive secrecy …
Wait a minute, thought Mularski, that’s probably where the leak came from – the Secret Service! He carefully considered the possible culprits: a) the Secret Service; b) someone from inside his own operation, which he doubted because the FBI’s security had been ratcheted up since Iceman had spotted the Fed involvement; c) SOCA knew about Matrix, but the British were always the most tight-lipped of the lot; and d), of course, the Germans – he simply didn’t have enough experience to judge the Germans, although had he detected a slightly abrasive relationship between the regional force in Stuttgart and the Federal Police Agency a couple of hours’ drive to the north in Wiesbaden, both of which had been privy to the DarkMarket story? He couldn’t be sure.
For the moment, speculation had to go onto the back burner. Mularski’s immediate concern was to get in touch with Frank Eissmann of the regional police in Stuttgart and discuss the Matrix investigation before the young German did a runner. Stuttgart decided it was time for the case to go on steroids and Eissmann brought forward Matrix’s planned arrest date. This in turn created problems for the police in London, Calgary and Paris, who had finally agreed at the London meeting in early April to pounce on their suspects on the same day – 12th June. SOCA was still feeling a touch awkward because the Secret Service had been watching JiLsi since the days of Shadowcrew. The Feds and the SS both wanted to bust him.
But Matrix did not do a runner. Indeed, his chats and emails that the German police were intercepting indicated that he was not phased at all by the hushmail. Perhaps the decision to speed up the Matrix case had been premature?
Exactly one week after the first email, he received a second, on 10th May. This time it was from auto496064@hushmail.com, and auto496064 was a tad upset:
Dude you fucked up.
Our network gave you german carders a fair warning and what do you go and do? Talk to the fucking FBI!
You are so damn dumb you deserve to go to jail.
However we intercepted communications between the FBI and a german guy calling himself ‘iceman’. They’ve got an undercover cop baiting you, waiting for you to buy/sell some stuff. We