29

SOFTLY SOFTLY

Istanbul, Turkey, 2008

Still anxious that Cha0 might enjoy protection from above, Bilal Şen
nonetheless persevered with his investigation. He promised to maintain
close contact with Agent Mularski in Pittsburgh once he had returned
to Istanbul. They had discussed the possibility of requesting the use
of Cha0’s Escrow Service on DarkMarket to see if they could smoke
him out that way, but quickly concluded that this was too laborious
and unlikely to yield results.

The other thing they knew about him, of course, was that he traded
in skimmers. Digitally he was impossible to track down. But if Cha0
was selling these skimmers, Bilal reasoned, there were two weak points
to his operation – their manufacture and their dispatch.

Skimming ATMs was becoming such a popular sport in Turkey that
ever more police officers were now schooled in how to spot them, once
they had been put in place. Many of the devices were shoddily built
and installed by amateurs. But flicking through the arrest and confis-
cation reports, the Inspector had observed that in some areas their
design and style were not only improving, but it appeared that they
were being manufactured in large numbers. Somewhere there must
be a factory. Intelligence alerted Şen to the possible presence of skimmer
factories in Romania and Bulgaria, so he sent out assistance requests
to their respective police forces. The other possibility was that Cha0’s
operation was masquerading as a legitimate business and ordering
them from licensed manufacturers of card readers inside Turkey.

Once he had acquired the skimmers, Cha0 would somehow have to