24

Marseilles, June 2007

Because they had effectively stopped talking to each other, the two US agencies launched their separate DarkMarket raids in parallel. With the Secret Service in attendance, Detective Spencer Frizzell had arrested Dron in Calgary four days before the FBI-backed Matrix operation in southern Germany.

For weeks Frizzell had been narrowing down the 'usual suspects', visiting the countless Internet cafés from which Dron had been working. Finally he singled out the ordinary-looking twenty-six-year-old who switched between his three 'casual' uniforms as he went about his business. The target lived in a decent apartment in downtown Calgary, conveniently positioned for the Light Rail Transit, naturally.

But neither Frizzell nor the Secret Service agent was quite prepared for what greeted them. The suspect, Nicholas Joehle, had about 100 skimming machines in production. Had he sold them all, it would have netted him $500,000, along with hundreds of blank plastic cards ready for cloning and holograms ready to be counterfeited. Of course the mere possession of these machines was not a crime in itself, but Frizzell was able to ascertain that Joehle had earned some $100,000 in skimmer sales during the period under investigation, a little under twelve months.

It is one thing for law enforcement to arrest a suspect of criminal activity over the Web. It is quite another mounting the evidence for charges to be brought. The virtual and transnational nature of the crime