DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [68]
With every step, Detlef’s fear about his new circumstances grew. How did a respectable middle-class boy find himself in this situation? He had finished high school with excellent grades and was preparing to go to college. His parents adored him and were grateful for all his help with his three younger siblings. Now the harmless boy from Eislingen was in Stammheim, the most notorious detention facility in all Germany. After stripping and searching him, the warders gave him oversized prison clothes, but no shoes. His new pyjamas looked so big they reminded him of wading trousers. Food arrived, but he had not yet fully understood that he was there to stay. He was in shock. Slowly he realised that this was the final stage of the little journey he had begun five years earlier. It was just one day after his twentieth birthday.
24
THE FRENCH CONNECTION
Marseilles, June 2007
Because they had effectively stopped talking to each other, the two US agencies launched their separate DarkMarket raids in parallel. With the Secret Service in attendance, Detective Spencer Frizzell had arrested Dron in Calgary four days before the FBI-backed Matrix operation in southern Germany.
For weeks Frizzell had been narrowing down the ‘usual suspects’, visiting the countless Internet cafés from which Dron had been working. Finally he singled out the ordinary-looking twenty-six-year-old who switched between his three ‘casual’ uniforms as he went about his business. The target lived in a decent apartment in downtown Calgary, conveniently positioned for the Light Rail Transit, naturally.
But neither Frizzell nor the Secret Service agent was quite prepared for what greeted them. The suspect, Nicholas Joehle, had about 100 skimming machines in production. Had he sold them all, it would have netted him $500,000, along with hundreds of blank plastic cards ready for cloning and holograms ready to be counterfeited. Of course the mere possession of these machines was not a crime in itself, but Frizzell was able to ascertain that Joehle had earned some $100,000 in skimmer sales during the period under investigation, a little under twelve months.
It is one thing for law enforcement to arrest a suspect of criminal activity over the Web. It is quite another mounting the evidence for charges to be brought. The virtual and transnational nature of the crime makes it extremely tough to convince a prosecutor to take the case on, and difficult to prove in court. Outside the United States, convictions in this embryonic area of the law tend to bring shorter sentences than conventional crime, which means that police forces are compelled to invest a lot of resources for some fairly unspectacular results. But the issue with somebody like Dron is that the more successful he became, the more his output would drain local and global economies. The potential losses from as skilled an operator as Dron were enormous. Nonetheless, there are tens of thousands of active cyber criminals out in the ether, and only a tiny fraction of them are ever likely to get caught.
Although he was taciturn and uneducated, Joehle was clearly talented. His combination of entrepreneurial and engineering skills would probably see him bounce back, once he had gone through a court case and imprisonment. He had already passed his know-how onto other members of DarkMarket, one of whom was building a vast factory of skimmers halfway around the world. But ultimately that was the responsibility neither of Dron nor of Detective Frizzell – the speed with which skills are communicated over the darkside of the Web is another compelling reason for national police forces to improve their communication with counterparts abroad.
Once Dron and Matrix were taken out, the police would need to move fast against their next targets before the DarkMarketeers noticed the sudden, and largely inexplicable, disappearance from the Internet of their regular contacts.