A CUNNING PLAN

Sweden, scrupulously avoided the trade in American credit or debit cards, as this would place him squarely in the sites of US law enforce- ment; the Swedes and other Europeans he could handle, but he was careful not to poke the Americans in the eye.

But many of the carders, especially the younger ones, were lax in their security, eschewing the use of encryption in their icq chats and failing to maintain proper VPN and tunnelling systems to mask their IP addresses. In Pittsburgh, however, Mularksi was steadily building a database with a program of his own design, which was able to cross- reference the activities of individual carders – he was reading their messages, logging their icq and IP addresses and, where possible, linking these to E-Gold accounts.

Unbeknownst to the users of this digital currency facility, government agencies had enjoyed full access to the records of E-Gold, the carders' favourite method of transferring money among themselves, since February 2006. This followed the arrest of its founder, Douglas Jackson, in Florida on suspicion that the service was being used for money- laundering. Few (if any) of the cyber criminals, though, had put two and two together with respect to E-Gold. Russians eschewed such Western-based companies, registered in Belize, preferring WebMoney instead, based in Moscow beyond the reach of Western law enforcement.

Armed with this growing body of evidence, Mularski made contact with the police in a number of European countries as autumn turned to winter in 2006. He talked to the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) in the United Kingdom, to the Federal Police in Germany and, later on, to the regional force in Baden-Württemberg.

He also approached the OCLCTIC in Paris, the recently formed and prosaically named Central Office in the Struggle Against Informa- tion and Communication Technology-related Crime. The reception he received here was a touch chilly. The French police are generally keen to cooperate with the United States, especially in the areas of terrorism and cybercrime, but traditional suspicion of America and its intentions in Europe still runs deep in French society. Any government that appears to be cosying up to the US is in danger of losing electoral brownie points, and so it cautions its organs to be circumspect in their dealings with Washington agencies.

The boss of OCLCTIC, Christian Aghroum, thought it ridiculous that every time he and his officers sought the assistance of a company