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bank accounts, pornography, warez or anything that could be deemed illegal in the United States nor in the international community. Any alleged business that transpires between our members is not our business and if it happens it happens outside of our forum. We do not condone or in any way partici- pate in illegal acts here.

The deeper he involved himself in the carding world, the more tangled he wove his moral web. As Iceman, he never bought and sold credit cards. But Vision created other online persona who did trade in them. The ability to section off parts of the personality was a common trait among hackers. At times Vision even appeared to believe that his virtual characters were autonomous in thought and deed, and therefore morally distinct entities.

As Iceman, he sought to defeat both his criminal competitors and the police in order to emerge as the unchallenged master of the carding world. This required a dual-pronged strategy. First, he must identify and expose all snitches (Confidential Informants or CIs) and cops who were stalking the carding boards. Second, he must vanquish the compe- tition – all the other carding boards vying for criminal traffic.

Long before the US Secret Service successfully engineered the closure of Shadowcrew, Iceman had identified that several of its key members were either informants for American and Canadian law enforcement or, perhaps, full-blown police officers. Those like Iceman who practised deception knew they must be equally skilled in perceiving the art in others. Experienced cyber thieves and cybercops alike knew that nothing encouraged disguise and dissemblance like the Internet. Iceman reasoned that spotting snitches was an essential part of the job.

When Iceman did uncover informants, he wrote famously vitriolic rants about them on the boards. Some members concluded that Iceman did protest too much. Was it possible that the master brain of Card- ersMarket was himself an informant? It certainly looked that way as he launched his master plan for annihilating the competition – a series of attacks on rival carding forums, aimed both at taking them out and absorbing their voluminous member databases into his own Carders- Market. Vision was quite open about his intentions: with his hallmark arrogance, he said he didn’t believe that other criminal websites like scandinaviarding.com or TalkCash ‘had any right to exist’.

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