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KINGPIN

teen hours a day to the site now. But Max didn't trust him either. It was well-known that C0rrupted lived in Pittsburgh, the home of the NCFTA.

Max had developed a new test function for possible informants, and in March he'd tried it out on the carder, announcing out of the blue that he was working with a terrorist cell “and we should have a shot at killing President Bush this coming weekend.” If C0rrupted was a fed, he'd be obliged to discourage the notional assassination plot, Max figured, or he'd ask for more details.

C0rrupted's response briefly assuaged Max's doubts. “Good luck with the president thing. Make sure you get the vice president as well. He is no better.”

There was a lot of work to do on the board. Carders Market was hopping, with over a dozen specialized vendors: DataCorporation, Bolor, Tsar Boris, Perl, and RevenantShadow sold credit card numbers with CVV2s, stolen variously from the United States, UK, and Canada; Yevin vended California driver's licenses; Notepad would check the validity of dumps for a small fee; Snake Solid moved U.S. and Canadian dumps; Voroshilov offered identity thieves a service that could obtain a victim's Social Security number and date of birth; DelusionNFX vended hacked online banking logins; Illusionist was Carders Market's answer to JiLsi, selling novelty templates and credit card images; Imagine competed with EasyLivin' in the plastics trade.

Max tried to run a tight ship—a “military base,” one carder critic groused. As in his white-hat days, he prized intellectual honesty, refusing to grant special favor to even his closest allies.

In April, C0rrupted prepared a review of Chris's latest generation of “novelty” IDs and plastics. He found them wanting—for one thing, the signature strips were printed right on the cards; you had to sign them with a felt-tip. He thought the products were worth five stars out of ten, but he asked Max if he should fluff his findings a little. “I know you and Easylivin' are close, so I wanted to know if I should post a true opinion review about these things that I felt, or if I should not be so harsh?”