THE OFFICE

appeared out of nowhere in early 2006 as the owner of a board called crimeenforcers.com, an elegantly designed site that offered aspiring cyber criminals all manner of back-up services. It was especially notable for its animated tutorial lessons featuring a cartoon version of Cha0, walking the viewer through the finer points of carding.

Cha0 used DarkMarket to promote crimeenforcers (paid advertising was an important revenue stream for the boards) and his ubiquitous presence and relentless business transactions were soon translated into real influence. He joined DarkMarket in February 2006 and within seven months was appointed one of the bosses.

Unlike his colleagues, he was that rare breed, a geek with a brilliant criminal mind. His motivation for accepting the top role was simple – he could use it to advance his enterprise as a distributor of the accessories needed to perpetrate economic crime, such as ‘skimmers’ – machines that could read, store and transmit a victim’s credit-card data.

But, as with the other leading figures on DarkMarket, Cha0’s story eventually turned out to be more byzantine than that – appropriately enough, for a resident of Istanbul.

Leaving aside the anomaly of Cha0, the most successful thieves on DarkMarket did not help manage the site. They were men like Freddybb and Recka, the carders from Scunthorpe and Sweden, who just dropped in now and then to conduct business and then disappeared for days, weeks and even months. Law enforcement across the world has arrested a much higher proportion of geeks than it has hardened criminals in its cyber operations.

As they slaved away at their PCs, the four senior managers were collectively responsible for four main tasks. Protecting the website’s servers and general maintenance were the responsibility of Master Splyntr and Matrix001. The quotidian threats to the site came not from law enforcement, but from DarkMarket’s rivals and enemies elsewhere in criminal cyberspace, such as Iceman. Splyntr, Matrix and JiLsi would sigh whenever there was a dust-up between members. Splyntr became accustomed to a pattern, if a little weary of it. One carder would accuse another of some transgression, possibly baseless, possibly true. The accused would throw his toys out of the pram and before long the injured party had marshalled a botnet in order to launch a DDoS attack. Tens of thousands of computers under a single Command and Control machine would request access to DarkMarket and the site would go