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credit cards because at a time of virtually o per cent
interest rates, they were still gaily charging anywhere
between 5 and 30 per cent. In Britain the head of Barclaycard
confessed to a parliamentary Select Committee that he did
not 'borrow on credit cards because it is too expensive.’

Other parts of the globe were less inclined to be moulded
by plastic. Western Europe had traditionally eschewed the
buccaneer economics that had so bewitched America and
Britain. As a consequence, credit-card ownership was much
lower, along with the level of personal debt. In Eastern
Europe there was neither sufficient capital spread across the
population nor a secure banking industry to administer
credit cards. Plastic was a rarity in the former communist
world, an executive toy for the New Russians - that tiny
proportion of the population who had made breathtaking
fortunes by ripping off their countries and compatriots during
the transition from communism to capitalism.

But in the Anglo-Saxon casino economics of the 1990s and
2000s, plastic was the closest invention to printing money ever
devised by financial institutions and they were not slow to
excavate this rich lode of capital. Tons of leaflets were sent
daily to addresses in the Western world exhorting people to
sign up for credit cards or to exchange an existing debt for a
new account that would not charge interest for six months.
For three or four years more diligent consumers were able
to secure interest-free credit as they transferred their
outstanding balance from one card to the next, while the
banks became ever more frantic in their attempts to secure
new customers.

So many cards. So much money with which to play. Since
large electronic wads of the stuff were sloshing around on
the Web, it was perhaps no surprise that it began to attract
the attention of cyber men from the East who were short on
cash, but brimming with technical ingenuity. One of them
was Script, eighteen-year-old Dimitry Golubov from Odessa.

And so it was that CarderPlanet was born.