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Hostile Takeover

“Rapidity is the essence of war. Take advantage of the enemy’s unreadiness, make your way by unexpected routes, and attack unguarded spots.”

Max had been reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, using the 2,600-year-old tome as his hacking manual. He sketched out his plans on a pair of whiteboards in his safe house; after some attrition and new entrants, there were five English-language carding sites that mattered in the underground, and that was four too many. He’d spent weeks infiltrating his competitors: ScandinavianCarding, the Vouched, TalkCash, and his chief rival, Dark-Market, the UK-run site that emerged a month before Carders Market and was building a powerful reputation as a ripper-free zone.

In a way, Max’s plan to muscle in on the other forums was coming from the white-hat side of his personality. The status quo was working fine for Max the criminal—he wasn’t greedy, and he was doing brisk business on Carders Market. But the post-Shadowcrew carding scene was broken, and when Max the white hat saw something broken, he couldn’t resist fixing it—just as he’d done for the Pentagon a few years earlier.

Ego played a role too. The whole carding world seemed to think Iceman was just another forum administrator, bankrupt of any skill except the ability to set up forum software. Max saw a golden opportunity to show the carders how wrong they were.