📸 Photo

FREE AMEX!

The carders converged like hungry piranhas on his poisoned page: Hundreds of their machines reported back to Max for duty. Excited, he began poking around the criminals' hard drives at random. He was surprised by how small-time it all looked. Most of his victims were buying small batches of dumps, ten or twenty at a time—even less. But there were lots of carders, and there was nothing to keep him from returning to their machines over and over again. In the end, the Free Amex attack would score him about ten thousand dumps.

He siphoned the dumps to Chris as he found them and vacuumed other useful data from his victims: details on their scams, stolen identity information, passwords, mailing lists used in phishing schemes, some real names, photos, and e-mail and ICQ addresses of their friends—useful for future attacks on the underground.

With a single well-constructed ruse, he was now invisibly embedded in the carders' ecosystem. This was the start of something big. He'd be a stick-up man among the carders, living off whatever he could skim from their illegal economy. His victims couldn't call the cops, and with his anonymous Internet connection and other precautions, he'd be immune to reprisal.

It wasn't long, though, before Max discovered that not all of the carders were what they seemed to be.

The victim was in Santa Ana. When Max strolled into the computer through his back door and began poking around, he saw at once that something was very wrong.

The computer was running a program called Camtasia that keeps a video record of everything crossing the computer's screen—not the kind of information a criminal normally wants to archive. Max foraged through the hard drive, and his suspicions were confirmed: The disk was packed with FBI reports.

Chris was shaken by the discovery of an FBI cybercrime agent in his