DARKMARKET

This was paradoxical as it was ‘ordinary’ members who routinely made the most money from DarkMarket: the administrators would often assume the greatest risk for the least financial reward. Over a three-year period JiLsi and Matrix made a paltry amount of money, while Master Splyntr only charged for the upkeep of the servers, focusing elsewhere on his spamming empire.

Then there was the intriguing character Shtirlitz, who was there almost from the beginning. The nickname referred to the fictional Max Otto von Stirlitz. In the novels of Julian Semyonov, Stirlitz was a senior officer spying for Moscow during the Second World War. Charac- terised as the Soviet James Bond, Stirlitz became entrenched in Russian consciousness thanks to a series of popular films based on the books in the 1970s. Quiet, but with devastating good looks, Stirlitz remains a powerful patriotic symbol in post-communist Russia for his immense courage, intelligence and unswerving commitment to the motherland.

So we know Stirlitz the Soviet spy, but who was Shtirlitz the carder (who transliterated his name into English from Russian, hence the extra ‘h’)? Was he an agent for the KGB too? Or perhaps a double agent, working for the Feds or the Secret Service? Or was he a master carder? One member of CarderPlanet who had met him described him as being ‘Aryan-looking and in his late twenties’. He regularly purchased counter- feit passports and at one point lived in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. On CarderPlanet he was described as ‘a good guy and reliable’, but later on other carders began to suspect that he may have emu- lated his fictional role model by morphing into one of America’s most experienced law enforcement officials.

Whatever his true goals as one of DarkMarket’s senior members, he was omnipresent but silent, logging relatively little activity. Likewise, a latecomer to the administration of the board, Lord Cyric appeared not to be involved in buying or selling at all. Each was too busy keeping everything afloat, while basking in their status as legends among the fraternity.

Equally, though, each harboured his own secrets, and some were not at all what they seemed.

Ironically, the one who took his personal security most seriously was in some respects the most transparent. This was Cha0. The Turkish criminal had come to the carding boards relatively late in the day. Unlike the rest, he was not a veteran of Shadowcrew or IAACA, but