DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [92]
Cha0 joined DarkMarket in February 2006, but his considerable abilities ensured a rapid rise up the hierarchy. Once he had consolidated his position as a prince of DarkMarket, he was able to focus on his real business strategy. He wanted to become the premier vendor of skimming machines and illegal readers worldwide. There was a significant demand for these devices and, if he could create a monopoly, then he would move into the next phase of his plan for maximising his revenue with minimal effort.
Our man from Istanbul was also in charge of DarkMarket’s crucial Escrow Service, perhaps the pivotal position in the entire operation. Acting as an honest broker, he would ensure that neither a buyer nor seller of credit cards and other illegal data could rip each other off. In that sense, DarkMarket was a mafia operation in the original meaning of the phrase. It acted as the policeman or arbitrator of a criminal market, just as the men of honour started by policing the agricultural markets of Sicily in the second half of the nineteenth century, before moving into the trade in illegal weapons and building permits.
Cha0’s reputation as a scrupulously honest escrow broker was built on his success as a wholesaler of skimming machines. Everybody trusted him. He, by contrast, trusted no one. He never gave away his IP address; he never sent a message that might implicate him in wrongdoing without encrypting it; and nobody could locate him digitally.
Accepting that Cha0 had created a black hole in cyberspace where he was safe and invisible from the cops, Bilal Sen decided he would have to rely on more traditional policing methods to track down his suspect – the ‘plod’ factor has proved surprisingly important in the work of cybercops.
29
SOFTLY SOFTLY
Istanbul, Turkey, 2008
Still anxious that Cha0 might enjoy protection from above, Bilal Sen nonetheless persevered with his investigation. He promised to maintain close contact with Agent Mularski in Pittsburgh once he had returned to Istanbul. They had discussed the possibility of requesting the use of Cha0’s Escrow Service on DarkMarket to see if they could smoke him out that way, but quickly concluded that this was too laborious and unlikely to yield results.
The other thing they knew about him, of course, was that he traded in skimmers. Digitally he was impossible to track down. But if Cha0 was selling these skimmers, Bilal reasoned, there were two weak points to his operation – their manufacture and their dispatch.
Skimming ATMs was becoming such a popular sport in Turkey that ever more police officers were now schooled in how to spot them, once they had been put in place. Many of the devices were shoddily built and installed by amateurs. But flicking through the arrest and confiscation reports, the Inspector had observed that in some areas their design and style were not only improving, but it appeared that they were being manufactured in large numbers. Somewhere there must be a factory. Intelligence alerted Sen to the possible presence of skimmer factories in Romania and Bulgaria, so he sent out assistance requests to their respective police forces. The other possibility was that Cha0’s operation was masquerading as a legitimate business and ordering them from licensed manufacturers of card readers inside Turkey.
Once he had acquired the skimmers, Cha0 would somehow have to distribute them. Mularski and Sen had uncovered some evidence suggesting that his products were going as far abroad as the United States, New Zealand and South America, and that some were bulk purchases. In