DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [99]
One of Mert’s contacts had asked the young man to keep an eye out for a certain Sadun Özkaya, a middle-class teenager whose parents were worried that he was straying. He had just been extracted from jail, where he was under investigation for fraud. The contact asked Mert to keep Sadun on the straight and narrow – which was like engaging a wolf to preach the benefits of veganism to another wolf, as the two of them lick their chops over the remains of a juicy young lamb.
Mert knew about cryptography and programming; Sadun knew about credit cards. Before long the two were pooling their skills. And, to Mert’s astonishment, Sadun told him that he was a member of DarkMarket, which he visited using two nicknames, Cryptos and PilotM. Within hours Mert Ortaç was logging in as the latter.
O, wonder! thought Mert as he espied the innards of DarkMarket for the first time:
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
Mert was transfixed. He explored every nook and cranny of the website, looking into its forums, learning to imitate its argot and then trying to uncover its secrets through slightly more devious means. Until now, Mert’s criminal aspirations had been focused on the area of smart-card decryption and selling cloned cards once he had cracked their coding system. Let loose on DarkMarket, he was quickly picking up new tips about credit-card fraud. The combination of these skills would lead him and Sadun into some very murky, if financially nutritious, waters.
Before that, however, he started to map everything about DarkMarket as if it were an underground maze with hidden traps and treasures. His bosses at National Intelligence of course wanted to uncover anything that related to DHKP/C, the terrorist organisation they were investigating. But Mert was more interested in everything else that was going on across the boards.
He very quickly understood that Cha0, Master Splyntr, Shtirlitz and Lord Cyric were key members of the site. By the time Mert started playing on DarkMarket, JiLsi and Matrix001 had already been taken down.
It took him only seconds to figure out that Cha0 was Turkish, although this was entirely by accident and had nothing to do with his hacking skills. He was browsing the advertisements for Cha0’s skimming machines when he spotted a Turkish sign for a doner kebab in the background. On another photo a skimmer for sale was standing next to some Turkish washing powder.
He relayed the news about the heavy Turkish influence on the website to his supervisor at the Intelligence Agency, who became even more interested in DarkMarket: not only were there left-wing terrorists active on the site, but it was actually run by Turks! This could be something major, so it required further investigation. Mert was given the authority to make contact with Cha0 and any other Turks that he found loitering around the DarkMarket board. It was not long before he thought he had identified another – Lord Cyric.
Mert started searching the archives of the early 1990s, when many geeks were using something called the BBS, or Bulletin Board Service, a bridge between an electronic messaging system and the Internet. As he was looking through the logs, his jaw dropped when he came across two familiar nicknames, sitting side by side: Cha0 and Lord Cyric! It would appear, he deduced, that these two masterminds of DarkMarket had known each other for a very long time.
31
A SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS
The fictional Lord Cyric had become popular among gamers and geeks in the 1980s and early 1990s. He was a self-appointed deity who haunted The Forgotten Realms, a godforsaken fantasy world where warriors roamed to seek out treasure and dark secrets while vanquishing creatures with magical powers and destructive urges. The Realms became a favourite territory for gamers to explore once they had assumed a fantasy role in a