partners - Theeeel near Paris, and Lord Kaisersose and Kalouche in Marseilles - would not have noticed that Spencer Frizzell had taken him out of circulation. Nonetheless the Secret Service did not know when Matrix, the most prolific DarkMarket administrator, would be taken down by the German police backed by the Feds. And his surprise removal from the board would probably freak remaining DM members.

In Sweden, Recka knew straight away that law enforcement was on the march. He had been exchanging friendly messages with Matrix on a daily basis, and he didn't buy the curious post that Matrix popped up with in early June 2007. My mother, Matrix explained, has had a serious accident and so I will be absent for a while. Any experienced cyber thief would immediately have concluded that the police had taken over his nickname (they had) and that this was just a feint.

Lord Kaisersose, Theeeel and company were different, of course - they were French. France was developing a peculiar contribution to cybercrime. French criminals were as doggedly francophone as the rest of their compatriots. France's language policeman, the Académie française, had observed with unease the exponential growth of English as a global lingua franca during the 1990s. But it was pleased to note that in the digital world most French hackers and geeks were committed to battle against English, the primary source of linguistic impurities.

This meant two things: cybercrime in France was initially genuinely national - nothing like as cross-border as elsewhere in the world. The country had pre-empted the Internet with the roll-out in 1982 of its very effective information technology called Minitel, which transmitted text onto a video screen along conventional phone lines. As a conse- quence, the French were much further advanced in their understanding of information technology than most of the rest of the world. The Minitel system, through which customers could look up phone numbers, check their bank accounts, send flowers or talk dirty using the messageries roses, was notably more secure against hackers than the Internet, which partly explains why the Web is only now eclipsing Minitel in France. So the French were less vulnerable to early viral infections on the Internet. Furthermore, relatively few French hackers spent time on boards like CarderPlanet, Shadowcrew and DarkMarket.

Second, the advance of spam emails in France has been slow. The returns are far less tempting than those generated by English, Spanish and, latterly, Chinese mass spam mailouts. The market is simply too