DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [70]
When arresting Theeeel, the police were mildly shocked to find that he was just eighteen years old – the youngest DarkMarketeer to be arrested anywhere in the world. He had become involved in carding to assist the funding of his university studies. If some young women find that they can only make their way through college financially by occasionally selling their bodies, it is quite predictable that young geeks must be tempted to top up their income, too. And as Theeeel discovered, once the money starts rolling in, it’s hard to kick the habit.
At first, French officers believed that Lord Kaisersose belonged to one of the many gangs of petty criminals that populate Marseilles, France’s very own Odessa: another engrossing port with an inimitable culture (and in Marseilles’s case a fabulous cuisine as well). From their surveillance, the cops had learned that one of Kaisersose’s accomplices, Dustin, owned a restaurant an hour outside the city and had form for minor fraud offences.
But when OCLCTIC officers, along with local Marseilles cops, raided the apartment of the suspect, Hakim B, in central Marseilles, they realised that Lord Kaisersose was in a higher league. Apart from the large variety of computer kit, the flat was furnished in a tasteful and elegant manner. Hakim was no street thug. He was a gifted hacker whose brother, Ali B., happened to work for DHL. There are few businesses more valuable to cyber criminals than the international courier trade. With Ali an insider at DHL, Hakim had ample means of shifting goods and cash in and out of Marseilles without anybody noticing. And that was important – because Hakim was one of the biggest resellers of dumps from the Ukrainian carding king, Maksik.
Over a two-year-period Maksik had sold Hakim the details of 28,000 credit cards, which had a ‘cash out’ value of around $10 million. Using his team – Ali, Dustin and one or two others – Hakim would send the cards to ATMs throughout southern France. He was careful never to use any French cards, only American ones. Had the US Secret Service not approached OCLCTIC in this case, Lord Kaisersose would have remained elusive to this day – and very much richer.
25
THE INVISIBLE MAN
Renukanth thought he could start a new life. His exclusion from DarkMarket had triggered a depression that lasted for three weeks. The site that he had nurtured from nothing was the only thing that mattered to him and it had been snatched away. As the winter of 2006 gave way to spring 2007 and his initial shock receded, a strange sense of liberation slowly overcame him. He found he was able to give up smoking crack and drinking. The fog in his brain started to lift and he returned to the gym, in an effort to lose some of the weight that had developed during his days as DarkMarket’s obsessive administrator. JiLsi was small, and it was a short journey from being stick thin to bulbous fat.
After a few weeks he sent a request to the DarkMarket administrators to allow him back onto the site. This they did, although they rejected his request to return as administrator. Instead, they conferred a unique – if meaningless – honorific title, Respected Member.
He could no longer wield the power of life and death over the website’s members, but he continued to assist its smooth functioning. One member had worked a credit card scam at a Texaco garage in Portsmouth on England’s south coast. Somebody had installed a mini-camera in the ceiling above the point-of-sale machine at the checkout. Not only were the cards being skimmed, but their owners were being filmed inputting their PINs. Unfortunately for JiLsi, he agreed to act as Escrow Officer purely as a favour to the other member. But worse than this, he asked another member, Sockaddr, to cash out the cards in the United States. Sockaddr was the primary undercover Secret Service agent on DarkMarket.
But JiLsi’s activity on the board became less frequent – his carding days were coming to an end. Although