📸 Photo

KINGPIN

capable of. He slid into the sites through the holes he’d secretly blasted in their ramparts, using his illicit admin access to copy their databases. The plan would have made Sun Tzu proud: Attacking and absorbing rival forums was an unexpected route indeed. Most carders wanted to avoid attention, not thrust themselves into prominence. A hostile takeover was unprecedented.

When he was done with the English-speaking sites, Max went to Eastern Europe. He’d strived to unite the Eastern European carders with the West, but Tea’s efforts had been largely fruitless—the Russians liked her but didn’t trust an American board. Diplomacy had failed; it was time for action. He found Cardingworld.cc and Mazafaka.cc no more secure than the western boards and was soon downloading their databases of private messages and forum posts. Megabytes of Cyrillic flowed onto his computer, a secret history of scams and hacks against the West stretching back months, now permanently warehoused on Max’s hard drive in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

When he was done, he executed the DROP command on all the sites’ databases, wiping them out. ScandinavianCarding, the Vouched, Talk-Cash, DarkMarket, Cardingworld—the bustling, twenty-four-hour-a-day marketplaces supporting a billion-dollar global underground economy all winked out of existence. Ten thousand criminals around the world, men with six-figure deals in the works; wives, children, and mistresses to support; cops to buy off; mortgages to pay; debts to satisfy; and orders to fill, were, in an instant, blind. Adrift. Losing money.

They would all know the name “Iceman.”

Max then went to work on the stolen membership data, ignoring, for now, the Eastern European carders. After culling the duplicates and undesirables from the four English-language sites, there were 4,500 new members for Carders Market. He rolled them all into his site’s database, so the carders could use their old nicknames and passwords to log in to their new home. Carders Market had six thousand members now. It was larger than Shadowcrew had ever been.