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KINGPIN

mum loss threshold of $100,000. Rather, he would be looking for trends that pointed to a common culprit—a group or a single hacker—responsible for a large number of cyberthefts. Then he’d shop the results to the various FBI field offices and, hopefully, hand off the investigation.

It was passive intelligence gathering, meticulous but unexciting. Mularski wasn’t in charge of the cases, and he never got the satisfaction of putting handcuffs on a bad guy. But for the first time in seven years, he could talk about his work with his wife over dinner.

Now he was back in the DC area for his first briefing on the carding scene. At the head of the room was Postal Inspector Greg Crabb, a solidly built man with world-weary eyes who worked in the post office’s international fraud unit. Crabb had stumbled upon the carding underground in 2002 while tracking a software counterfeiter with a sideline in credit card fraud. Since then, he’d been on the ground in twenty-five countries, working with local police to make busts and building a massive database of raw intelligence on the growing community: nicknames, IP addresses, instant messages, and e-mails of more than two thousand people. He’d become the government’s top expert on the scene, but the enormity of his crusade now threatened to overwhelm him. So he’d come to the FBI for help.

The briefing for about half a dozen FBI agents was held at a nondescript Calverton, Baltimore, office where the bureau ran its Innocent Images anti-child porn operation. Speaking slowly in a rumbling, midwestern twang, the postal inspector weighed each word like a parcel as he ran through the history of the scene: CardersLibrary spawning CarderPlanet, the legend of King Arthur, the influence of the Russians and Ukrainians, and the rise and fall of Shadowcrew. He threw up a screenshot of CarderPlanet to show the underground’s structure: A site operator was the don. Admins were capos. It was a metaphor to which the FBI was institutionally attuned; hackers were the new mafia.

Operation Firewall, Crabb explained, had left the carders scattered, paranoid, and disorganized. But they were rebuilding. And unlike before,