The Odessa Files

and flickering PC screens. Cigarettes and Coca-Cola were so ubiquitous
it was as though they were the only kosher nutrition tolerated by some
ancient Lore of the Geek.

Dimitry liked games as much as anyone, though his preference was
for exploring the world from the comfort of Odessa's Internet cafés.
But young Golubov did not only enjoy surfing the sites of distant lands,
he wanted to penetrate them and explore their innards.

By the time he was sixteen in 1999, Visa and MasterCard had blocked
the use of their cards on the websites registered in the former Soviet
Union. When Russian Internet companies submitted invoices to the
two credit giants, they were ignored. But Golubov and his fellow
pioneers soon worked out that if you could somehow extract the infor-
mation held on a credit card and reproduce it, then you could use the
data to take cash out of ATMs or to buy goods on the Internet and
then send them to a third party somewhere else in the world. One
option was to copy that information from the physical credit card itself,
although at first that involved the laborious and hence wholly unsatis-
factory act of conventional robbery. Much better by far, you could simply
sniff out the information stored in the gold mines that were company
databanks!

And even if some American websites would not deliver to the former
Soviet Union, they were happy to send goods to places like the United
Arab Emirates or Cyprus, two countries that had rapidly become
favoured destinations of the new Russian moneyed elite. This was one
of the first truly globalised crimes. Money was stolen by a Russian in
Ukraine from an American company and paid out in Dubai - and the
whole transaction need last no longer than ten minutes!

The other great breakthrough that moulded the new profession of
carding was the skimming device. 'Skimmers' are machines that read
and store the magnetic strip on a credit card. They come in several
shapes and sizes. Some are small rectangles that can be affixed to
ATMs so that when a customer's card is read by the bank's machine,
it is also read by the 'skimmer'. Others are identical to the point-of-sale
devices through which a waiter or petrol-station cashier will swipe a
card for payment. At both the ATM or the rogue point-of-sale device
there may well be a tiny camera hidden somewhere that is secretly
recording the customer inputting their PIN (note to self: always cover
the keypad when tapping in your PIN).