DARKMARK

bank accounts, pornography, warez or anything that could be
deemed illegal in the United States nor in the international
community. Any alleged business that transpires between our
members is not our business and if it happens it happens
outside of our forum. We do not condone or in any way partici-
pate in illegal acts here.

The deeper he involved himself in the carding world, the more
tangled he wove his moral web. As Iceman, he never bought and sold
credit cards. But Vision created other online persona who did trade in
them. The ability to section off parts of the personality was a common
trait among hackers. At times Vision even appeared to believe that his
virtual characters were autonomous in thought and deed, and therefore
morally distinct entities.

As Iceman, he sought to defeat both his criminal competitors and
the police in order to emerge as the unchallenged master of the carding
world. This required a dual-pronged strategy. First, he must identify
and expose all snitches (Confidential Informants or CIs) and cops who
were stalking the carding boards. Second, he must vanquish the compe-
tition – all the other carding boards vying for criminal traffic.

Long before the US Secret Service successfully engineered the closure
of Shadowcrew, Iceman had identified that several of its key members
were either informants for American and Canadian law enforcement
or, perhaps, full-blown police officers. Those like Iceman who practised
deception knew they must be equally skilled in perceiving the art in
others. Experienced cyber thieves and cybercops alike knew that nothing
encouraged disguise and dissemblance like the Internet. Iceman
reasoned that spotting snitches was an essential part of the job.

When Iceman did uncover informants, he wrote famously vitriolic
rants about them on the boards. Some members concluded that Iceman
did protest too much. Was it possible that the master brain of Card-
ersMarket was himself an informant? It certainly looked that way as
he launched his master plan for annihilating the competition – a series
of attacks on rival carding forums, aimed both at taking them out and
absorbing their voluminous member databases into his own Carders-
Market. Vision was quite open about his intentions: with his hallmark
arrogance, he said he didn't believe that other criminal websites like
scandnaviacarding.com or TalkCash 'had any right to exist'.