Dark Market by Misha Glenny

Author:Misha Glenny [Glenny, Misha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 2011-09-08T22:00:00+00:00

22

DUDE YOU FUCKED UP

Baden-Württemberg, 2007

It was a pleasant evening in early May, although it didn’t feel much like springtime to Matrix001. The external world receded as his mouth dried and his eyes ran over the email one more time.

Your landline is tapped.

Cops in UK, Germany, France are onto you . . . Hide evidence.

Warn others . . . Cops know matrix-001 is detlef hartmann from eislingen . . .

You only got a few weeks before cops hit in uk and france . . . Warn all carders you can get hold of.

What did this mean? Who did it come from? He looked at the sender’s address again: [email protected]. That was probably randomly generated. And it was impossible to identify anything about the author, except that his English appeared to be fluent.

Matrix decided he should consult his fellow DarkMarket administrators and a couple of other confidants. What, he asked, did they all make of this? Their replies were oddly bland, in some cases almost indifferent, mere warnings for him to keep an eye out.

In Pittsburgh, Keith Mularski felt anything but indifferent. The email extracts that he and the others had received from Matrix meant only one thing: the operation was being leaked. And if it was being leaked to Matrix, who else was being tipped off? The timing could hardly be worse, as for several months the FBI had been planning the first wave of DarkMarket arrests. It was bad enough having to deal with an uncooperative Secret Service. The German police from the federal state of Baden-Württemberg (LKA) had heard that their French colleagues were preparing a DarkMarket related bust, but the French police had snubbed them, saying that their presence at a planning meeting in Paris with Britain’s SOCA and the Secret Service would be unnecessary.

The anonymous hushmail sent to Matrix001 triggered an anxiety among the investigating police forces that would linger for many months. They needed to know whether the leak was a result of carelessness or an inside job, or indeed whether a hacker had penetrated one of the investigating teams’ computer networks. Every time something went wrong, the suspicion that there was a traitor among the ranks bubbled up to the surface. Morale could not help but suffer.

Mularski’s attempts to coordinate the first arrests were proving difficult. The fear for any cybercop is that, if one fraudster is taken in without the others, news will spread like wildfire across the boards that something bad is going on and targets will simply disappear. Hence the Secret Service’s obsessive secrecy . . .

Wait a minute, thought Mularski, that’s probably where the leak came from – the Secret Service! He carefully considered the possible culprits: a) the Secret Service; b) someone from inside his own operation, which he doubted because the FBI’s security had been ratcheted up since Iceman had spotted the Fed involvement; c) SOCA knew about Matrix, but the British were always the most tight-lipped of the lot; and d), of course, the Germans – he simply

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