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KINGPIN

when the scams eventually became public in the press, the newbies remembered they’d heard it first from Master Splyntr.

In the meantime, the FBI agent was soaking up the history of the forums while honing his prose to affect the cynical, profanity-laced style of the underground.

After a few months, Mularski faced the first challenge to his intelligence-gathering operation. The initial crop of forums that grew from the detritus of Shadowcrew had been wide open to new members—spooked by Operation Firewall, many scammers had adopted new handles, and without reputations to trade on there’d been no way for carders to vet one another. Now that was changing. A new breed of “vouched” forums was emerging. The only way to get on them was to win the sponsorship of two existing members. Constrained by the Justice Department’s guidelines, Mularski had deliberately avoided forming direct relationships in the underground. Who would vouch for him?

Borrowing a page from a Robert Ludlum novel, Mularski decided Master Splyntr needed a background legend that could propel him into the new crime boards. His thoughts turned to a Europe-based antispam organization called Spamhaus that he’d worked with as part of previous FBI initiatives.

Founded in 1998 by a former musician, Spamhaus charts the ever-changing lineup of Internet addresses spewing garbage into consumers’ in-boxes; its database of spam sources is used by two-thirds of the world’s ISPs as a blacklist. Of more interest to Mularski was the organization’s public most-wanted list of notorious spammers. Peopled by the likes of Alan “Spam King” Ralsky and the Russian Leo “BadCow” Kuvayev, the Registry of Known Spam Operations, or ROKSO, is second only to a federal grand jury indictment on the list of places an Internet scammer doesn’t want to see his name.

Mularski phoned up founder Steve Linford in Monaco to explain his scheme: He wanted to be on ROKSO—or, at least, he wanted Master Splyntr there. Linford agreed, and Mularski went to work crafting his