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OPERATION FIREWALL

one who gently folded the great CarderPlanet before anyone else could enjoy the pleasure of taking it down.

Shadowcrew's leaders wouldn't be so lucky. In September, the FBI pulled the plug on Thomas's operation and gave him a month to move out of his apartment—ending his war with Cumbajohnny. The next month, on October 26, sixteen Secret Service agents gathered in a Washington command center to drop the hammer on Operation Firewall. Their targets were marked on a map of the United States filling a wall of computer displays. Every one of them would be at home, the agents knew; at the Secret Service's behest, Gonzalez had called an online meeting for that evening, and nobody said no to Cumbajohnny.

At nine p.m., agents armed with MP5 semiautomatic assault rifles burst into Shadowcrew members' homes around the country, grabbing three founders, T-Mobile hacker Ethics, and seventeen other buyers and sellers. It was the biggest crackdown on identity thieves in American history. Two days later, a federal grand jury handed down a sixty-two-count conspiracy indictment and the Justice Department went public with Operation Firewall.

“This indictment strikes at the heart of an organization that is alleged to have served as a one-stop marketplace for identity theft,” Attorney General John Ashcroft boasted in a press release. “The Department of Justice is committed to taking on those who deal in identity theft or fraud, whether they act online or off.”

With Gonzalez's help, the Secret Service locked Shadowcrew's remaining four thousand users out of the site and swapped in a new front page featuring a Secret Service banner and an image of a prison cell. The new page struck the Shadowcrew tagline, “For Those Who Like to Play in the Shadows,” and substituted a new motto: “You Are No Longer Anonymous!!”

Panicked carders around the around the world soaked up the news