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KINGPIN

nouncement convinced him—correctly—that Cumbajohnny was a federal informant.

Thomas became fixated on exposing his rival. Ignoring admonishments from his FBI handler, he continuously called out Gonzalez on the forums. Gonzalez, too, seemed to have it in for El Mariachi—he dug up a copy of the police report from Thomas’s Seattle arrest and circulated it among the Eastern European carders, drawing their attention to the part where Thomas offered to help catch Russians. A full-blown proxy war had broken out between the FBI and Secret Service, by way of two informants.

It was a bad time to be distracting the Eastern Europeans with American carder drama. In May 2004, one of CarderPlanet’s Ukrainian founders was extradited to the United States, after being arrested on vacation in Thailand. The next month, the British national police moved in on the site’s only native English-speaking administrator in Leeds.

Script, getting heat from the Orange County FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, had already retired from the site, leaving King Arthur in charge. On July 28, 2004, King made an announcement.

“It is time to tell you the bad news—the forum should be closed,” he wrote. “Yes, it really means closed and there are a lot of reasons for that.”

In broken English he explained that CarderPlanet had become a magnet for law enforcement agencies around the world. When carders were busted, police interrogators badgered them with questions about the forum and its leaders. Under the relentless pressure, he implied, even he might slip up. “All of us are just people and all of us can make mistakes.”

By closing CarderPlanet, he would be depriving his enemies of their greatest asset. “Our forum held them well informed and up to date, and on our forum they and the bank employees just have been raising their level of proficiency and knowledge,” he wrote.

“Now all of thing will be the same but they will not know where the wind blows from and what to do.”

With that farewell note, King Arthur, almost certainly a millionaire ten times over, became a carder legend. He would be remembered as the