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KINGPIN

an electrical engineer with a prior criminal record—details that jibed with the biography Cha0 had shared privately with Mularski.

The police approached several international shipping companies and briefed them about Cha0's operations. One of them identified some of the skimmer shipments from Istanbul to Europe, fingering a known member of Cha0's organization as the shipper.

That gave the police the evidence they needed. On September 5, five police in bulletproof vests raided Cha0's apartment on the outskirts of Istanbul. They rushed into his house and pushed Cha0 and an associate to the ground at gunpoint.

Inside his apartment was a complete electrical lab and assembly line, with components neatly organized in trays and bins. Nearly a dozen computers were running on the desks. Cha0 had all the same card-counterfeiting equipment that had graced Chris Aragon's factory, as well as giant cardboard boxes holding some one thousand skimmers and two thousand PIN pads, all awaiting international shipment. Cha0's records showed that four of them had already gotten into the United States.

The cops brought Evyapan out in handcuffs, a tall, beefy man with close-cropped hair and a black T-shirt emblazoned with the Grim Reaper. The face of organized crime in the Internet age.

Cha0 was the last listed target in Mularski's undercover authorization; the other key DarkMarket players had already been taken down. Markus Kellerer, Matrix001, was arrested in Germany in May 2007 and spent four months in a high-security prison. Renukanth "Jilsi" Subramaniam, a Sri Lankan-born British citizen, was raided in London in June 2007 after detectives with the Serious Organised Crime Agency in Britain staked out the Internet café he used as an office, matching his appearances at the Java Bean with Jilsi's posts on DarkMarket and his chats with Master Splyntr. Jilsi's associate, sixty-seven-year-old John "Devilman" McHugh,