THE DREAM WORLD OF MERT ORTAÇ

He was never able to control his spending, even later on when he was
making considerable sums of money from his carding activities.

Mert’s friends were very important to him, in part because he sometimes
found affection hard to come by. Whether he was aware of it or not,
he used the Digiturk money to buy friendship – and there were plenty of
twenty-somethings in Istanbul who were prepared to become pals with
a young man apparently willing to underwrite expensive partying. Of course,
whenever the money ran out, most of those characters went missing.

He was also desperate to prove that he was something special (which,
given his computer talents, he undoubtedly was). And so he would
systematically exaggerate his achievements. As this tendency developed,
so did Mert’s consciousness start to float permanently between reality
and fantasy. He seemed to lose the ability to distinguish between the
two at an early stage. So complete was this meshing that, were he ever
to take a lie-detector test, it would probably either go off the scale or
not register a blip. Of course, in one respect this meant that he adapted
to the culture of the Internet – the valley of lies – with ease.

Following a series of jobs in IT for various companies, Mert was
taken on, in June 2006, by the local concession of Toshiba, whose
personnel department failed to spot that he was under criminal investigation
for the Digiturk fraud. Nonetheless, it did not take long for
Mert’s colleagues at Toshiba to start wondering at some of his behaviour.
They were also a touch suspicious of the certificate which purported
to show that he had a degree in the Science of Cryptology from the
University of Cambridge.

The trustees, so read the certificate, ‘have granted this diploma as
evidence thereof given in the city of London in the Cambridge at the
twenty-second day of june two thousand four’.

Perhaps they conferred the diploma in the Cambridge Arms in the
City of London? Wherever the fictitious ceremony had taken place, the
certificate was so crude that it hardly merited the epithet ‘counterfeit’.

One of his colleagues at Toshiba’s IT department was struck by how
often Mert boasted about his relationship with National Intelligence.
He, too, had offered occasional assistance to the spooks, especially in
the late 1990s when the Agency had yet to develop its own effective
cyber division. But one did not brag about such matters. Mert’s constant
mutterings about his close relationship with intelligence really did jar.