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KINGPIN

By all evidence, criminals were e-gold’s bread and butter. By December 2005, the company’s internal investigations had identified more than three thousand accounts involved in carding, another three thousand used for buying and selling child porn, and thirteen thousand accounts linked to various investment scams. They were easy enough to spot: the “memo” field in child porn transactions would read, for example, “Lolita”; in Ponzi schemes, “HYIP,” for “high-yield investment program.” Carders included shorthand descriptions of what they were buying: “For 3 IDs”; “for dumps”; “10 classics”; “Fame’s dumps”; “10 M/C”; “one plat and six classics”; “20 vclassics”; “18 ssns”; “10 AZIDs”; “4 v classics”; “four cvv2s”; “for 150 classics.”

For a long time, e-gold largely turned a blind eye to the criminal trade; employees locked down some accounts used by child porn sellers but didn’t stop them from transferring out their money. But the company’s attitude changed dramatically in December 2005, when FBI and Secret Service agents executed a search warrant at e-gold’s Melbourne, Florida, offices and accused Jackson of running an unlicensed money transfer service.

Jackson began voluntarily searching his database for signs of criminality and sending tips to the only agency that wasn’t trying to put him in jail, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. His newfound commitment to law and order was a boon to Mularski. Through Greg Crabb and his team at the post office, Mularski asked Jackson for information about Matrix001’s e-gold account, which was under the alias “Ling Ching.” When Jackson looked in his database, he found that the account had originally been set up under another name: Markus Kellerer, with a street address in Eislingen. In November, Mularski sent a formal request for assistance to the German national police through the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt. The police confirmed that Kellerer was a real person and not just another alias, and Mularski booked his flight to Stuttgart.

Matrix001 would be the first arrest from the DarkMarket sting. Mularski would have to find someone else to chat with about video games.