📸 Photo

DarkMarket

The man is sitting rigid on a polished wooden chair and staring balefully into the camera. Paint peels from a cracked plaster wall behind him. He's been stripped down to his underwear, and he's holding a handwritten sign over his exposed paunch. I AM KIER, it reads, in large block letters. MY REAL NAME IS MERT ORTAC. . . . I AM RAT. I AM PIG. I AM FUCKED BY CHA0.

The appearance of the photo on DarkMarket in May 2008 sent Mularski hurrying back into the NCFTA communications room. Headquarters would want to know that one of Master Splyntr’s admins had just kidnapped and tortured an informant.

Cha0 was an engineer in Istanbul who sold high-quality ATM skimmers and PIN pads to fraudsters around the world. Covertly affixed to a cash machine, the skimmer would record the magstripe data on every debit or credit card fed into the ATM, while the PIN-pad overlay stored the user’s secret code.

Cha0 cut a jaunty presence in the underground. His Flash-animated banner ad on DarkMarket was a classic, opening with a cartoon man wading through a house full of cash. “Is that you?” the text asks. “Yes. If you bought a skimmer and PIN pad from Cha0.” A similarly styled video tutorial for new customers was narrated by a smiling caricature of Cha0 himself. “Hi, my name is Cha0. I’m a developer of skimming devices. I work