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KINGPIN

and wrote a note on the back of a deposit slip: “This is a robbery. I have a bomb. Give me money or I’ll blow the bank.” Then he put the slip back on the pile as a surprise for the next customer.

When he was seventeen, Giannone joined Shadowcrew and CarderPlanet under the handle MarkRich, and started participating in small operations. His reputation went south when he was busted carding plane tickets and a rumor spread that he’d snitched on a forum regular while in juvenile hall.

Undaunted, Giannone paid a more established carder for the exclusive right to take over his handle and reputation. As “Enhance,” the teen became more bold but not more successful. In May 2003, copying an extortion tactic perfected by the Russians, he borrowed a hacker’s botnet and launched a DDoS attack against JetBlue, taking down the airline’s website for some twenty-five minutes before sending an e-mail demanding $500,000 in protection money. But JetBlue paid him neither cash nor the respect a cybergangster deserved. “We will forward this to the appropriate law enforcement agencies,” the company wrote. “Yesterday’s outage was due to a system upgrade.”

When Max found Giannone with his Free Amex hack, the teen was running his operations from the computer in his mother’s bedroom. But Max and Chris had looked over Giannone’s files and decided he could be partner material. Chris in particular may have seen something of himself in the young, coke-snorting gangster wannabe. Giannone was already a regular visitor to Orange County—he liked vacationing in the sun—and the two began partying together. Chris called his apprentice “the Kid.”

Max knew everything about Giannone, while Giannone knew virtually nothing about him. For Max, it was an ideal arrangement for a partnership. Giannone made some sales of Max’s dumps and then introduced Max to other carders interested in making buys over ICQ. Max set up a new online identity for his vending: “Generous.”

Dealing with strangers was a big step for Max, and he took elaborate precautions to stay safe. When using carder forums or instant-messaging