DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [85]
Perhaps that stubbornness helped the raw recruit through his first posting at a village police station in the middle of Anatolian nowhere. Although this was by now the mid-1990s, the only machine here was an ancient manual typewriter. Taking down witness statements was considered below his dignity as an officer, but Bilal was so determined to improve his typing that he spent many an hour banging on those keys. When he wasn’t doing that, this remarkable autodidact was teaching himself Mandarin.
When he applied to join Ankara’s elite Organised Crime Unit, the chief there asked Bilal why he was learning Chinese. ‘With China opening its doors to the outside world,’ he answered, ‘we are soon going to need Mandarin-speakers in the Department for Organised Crime.’ That reply swung it for him and he landed the job.
Once in the Turkish capital, the young detective signed up for a Masters at Ankara University, again off his own bat and in his spare time. He selected a topic unknown and unstudied in Turkey – ‘The Opportunities and Risks of E-Government’ – in which he considered the relationship between privacy, civil rights and cybercrime.
Bilal Sen began to monitor the proliferation of Internet crime in his country, one of the few Turkish policeman with the capacity to do so – the only other organs of state already aware of the strategic importance of cyber security were the military and civilian intelligence agencies, but they, of course, never advertised their capabilities or motives.
Together with a colleague, Bilal set himself the Herculean task of persuading the unwieldy Interior Ministry to divert some of its precious funds to the establishment of a Cyber Crime Unit. It took three years of pleading, cajoling and politicking. Fortunately, he had a collaborator who had mastered the Ottoman art of striking the right tone with the appropriate bureaucrats in the Interior Ministry.
As with all the cybercrime units springing up in police forces around the world, Turkey’s new department was able to exploit the fact that virtually nobody else in the ministry understood the dark side of computers. Once given the go-ahead, the two men found themselves oddly free from outside interference, as nobody else had a clue what they were doing and they were hardly a burden on the Exchequer.
While the Inspector’s own government was scarcely aware of his work, his counterparts way across the Atlantic had soon taken note of his achievements. In the summer of 2007 as police in Germany and Britain arrested the DarkMarket administrators, Matrix001 and JiLsi, Turkey’s cybercrime team had put one of the most notorious cyber criminals, Maksik, behind bars. A major player on DarkMarket (he had supplied amongst others the French hacker, Lord Kaisersose in Marseilles with ‘dumps’), Maksym Yastremsky from the north-eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov had assumed he would be safe in Turkey – not only did no cyber criminal ever get arrested there, but relations between Ukraine and Turkey had never been more cordial, especially in the underworld.
The Ukrainians also adored the country for its gorgeous coast – Antalya’s beautiful beaches had become a de rigueur destination for cyber thieves from both nations.
The US Secret Service had been tracking Maksik for two years. They had successfully stolen the secrets of his laptop in 2006 and then set up meetings between him and an undercover Secret Service agent in Thailand, Dubai and Turkey. In the past, cooperating with the Turkish police had proven awkward, if not downright impossible. But in arresting Maksik while he was languishing in Antalya’s blistering sunshine, Turkish police had sent out a signal that on cybercrime, they were keen to cooperate and they had the know-how to do it.
Although the JiLsis and Matrixes of this world were no longer treading the DarkMarket boards, the rest of the crew were still