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ONE PLAT AND SIX CLASSICS

was going to Germany to talk with prosecutors about DarkMarket’s co-founder Matrix001.

Among other things, Matrix001 was DarkMarket’s resident artist *par excellence*. He created and sold Photoshop templates used by forgers to produce credit cards or fake ID. He had them all: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, the U.S. Social Security card, notary seals, and driver’s licenses for several states. His template for an American passport sold for $45. A Bank One Visa was $125.

Matrix001 and Master Splyntr had grown tight since the attempted exposé three months earlier: Mularski and the German both liked video games, and they chatted about the latest titles well into the night. They talked business, too, and Matrix001 had confided that he received wire transfers for some of his sales in the town of Eislingen in southern Germany. That was the first clue to tracking him down.

From there, it was a matter of following the money. Like virtually all carders, Matrix preferred to be paid by e-gold, an electronic payment system created by a former Florida oncologist named Douglas Jackson in 1996. A competitor to PayPal, e-gold was the first virtual currency backed by deposits of actual gold and silver bullion held in bank vaults in London and Dubai.

It had been Jackson’s dream to forge a true international monetary system independent of any government. Criminals loved it. Unlike a real bank, e-gold took no measures to verify the identity of its users—account holders included “Mickey Mouse” and “No Name.” To get money in or out of e-gold, users availed themselves of any of hundreds of independent e-gold exchangers around the world, businesses that would accept bank transfers, anonymous money orders, or even cash in hand and convert it to e-gold for a cut. Exchangers took another slice when a user wanted to convert in the other direction, changing the virtual money into the local currency or receiving it by Western Union, PayPal, or wire transfer. One company even offered a preloaded ATM card—the “G-Card”—that would let account holders withdraw their e-gold from any cash machine.