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like Microsoft, they ran the risk of an outcry, containing predictable accusations of the police being in the pocket of giant American corpo- rations. The fact was, Aghroum knew, that you couldn’t really start combating cybercrime unless you had a degree of cooperation with companies like Microsoft. Articulate, and a shrewd analyst of the political minefield that surrounds international policing, Aghroum was resigned to the fact that neither politicians nor the public in France had any idea about cybercrime and what you need in order to defeat it. Most French people seemed to harbour the illusion that you can combat and contain transnational crime from within your own borders, especially if the criminal in question could not speak French.

But Mularski was in for an even greater shock than the well-known issue of Gallic anti-Americanism. OCLCTIC, he was told, had already been working for several months with the US Secret Service on a case related to . . . DarkMarket. A parallel investigation was under way and he had known nothing about it. Moreover, the US Secret Service showed no inclination to share information about their investigation. A few months earlier the boss of the Secret Service’s Criminal Investigation Division had testified to Congress that due to its close cooperation with ‘other federal, state and local enforcement . . . we are are able to provide a comprehensive network of intelligence-sharing, resource-sharing and technical expertise’. He forgot to tell that to the team investigating DarkMarket, because they refused even to share with the FBI who they were targeting. Matters were about to get complicated for cybercops and cyber thieves alike.

Most DarkMarketeers were not focusing on law enforcement at the time (except the ones collaborating with Mularski). Rather, they wanted to assert the site’s supremacy by finishing off Iceman. JiLsi took it upon himself to administer the fatal blow. If he succeeded, it would be his finest hour and his reputation would be considerably enhanced. He had also had enough of Iceman’s repeated incursions, which created endless extra work for him; and the bilious rhetoric, Iceman’s trade- mark, was also getting to him.

JiLsi’s plan was simple. He created an anonymous email account, which he used to send messages to Iceman’s Internet Service Provider. He warned the ISP that CardersMarket, which it hosted, was a criminal site and its owners were involved in major credit-card fraud. When Iceman discovered the account from which the denunciatory emails

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