DarkMarket

~ the goodbye ~

Renukanth Subramaniam was a Sri Lankan-born British citizen who had delivered pizzas, and in 2005 he set up a web forum from internet cafes in north London. DarkMarket sold stolen credit card numbers, identities, magnetic stripe dumps and the hardware to make more of them. Entry was by invitation, vendors were reviewed by other members, and at its peak the membership sat around 2,500 people spread across a long list of countries.

The structure is the part worth understanding, because it was copied for the next fifteen years. ShadowCrew had gone down in 2004, and DarkMarket arrived into that gap running reputation like a marketplace: a seller's dumps were tested by buyers and rated in public, so a stranger's product could be trusted without trusting the stranger. British police later called it a Facebook for fraudsters.

Subramaniam ran the thing as JiLsi from public terminals, which was good operational practice and terrible bookkeeping. At one point he lost about one hundred thousand pounds of his own money with a single mislaid memory stick.

From November 2006 onward the site he had built was being administered by the United States government, and he did not know.

~ the chronicle ~

~ master splyntr ~

J. Keith Mularski was a cybercrime agent in the FBI's Pittsburgh office. He went in wearing the identity of a spammer, under the handle Master Splyntr, posted constantly, and by his own account spent anywhere from one hour to fifteen hours a day in character. Carding forums are suspicious by design, so the way to earn standing was to be useful, and he was: he climbed to moderator, then higher.

Then rival forums started hammering DarkMarket offline, and Master Splyntr offered to host it on his own servers. The offer was accepted. For roughly the last two years of its life the most important criminal marketplace on the English-speaking internet ran on FBI hardware, with an FBI agent reading every private message. An internal bureau email from March 2007 put it in four words: Master Splynter is me.

~ the arrest in istanbul ~

The forum's most feared vendor was a Turkish member who went by Cha0. Çağatay Evyapan was an electrical engineer, and what he sold was manufacturing: ATM and point-of-sale skimming devices good enough to be fitted to live machines, shipped to buyers abroad. He told people he was a very traditional organized criminal rather than a computer hacker, and the inventory backed him up.

His undoing was temperament. When an associate crossed him, the man was picked up and beaten and a photograph of him in his underwear went onto the forum, and that kind of noise brings police. Turkish officers arrested Evyapan in Istanbul at the beginning of September 2008, a month before the forum itself came down. In Turkey it was reported as a hacker arrest, which is the easy frame for it. The devices were being built here; the accounts they emptied mostly were not.

~ 4 october 2008 ~

The FBI pulled the plug on 4 October 2008, with Master Splyntr announcing the closure to the members as if it were his decision. Nine days later Kevin Poulsen published the documents at Wired, sourced from the German public broadcaster Südwestrundfunk, and the forum's administrator was revealed as a federal agent to an audience that included everybody who had ever posted there. The bureau announced the conclusion of the operation on 16 October.

The count came to more than sixty arrests across the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Turkey, with an estimated seventy million dollars in card fraud prevented. Subramaniam pleaded guilty and was sentenced at Blackfriars Crown Court to four years and eight months, reported on 1 March 2010. Another member, Thomas James Frederick Smith, pleaded guilty on 10 June 2010. Misha Glenny turned the whole business into a book in 2011, which is still the best account of what a carding forum actually felt like from inside.

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