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JiLsi – in real life he worked for an IT security company in Germany. It was ironic, but somehow very DarkMarket, that he ended up offering security to criminals and cops alike on the website.

Despite intense efforts, Bilal Şen had failed to match Cha0's style (or MO, as the police describe it) with any known criminals in Turkey itself. The two fundamental aspects of the Internet's darkside seemed to coincide in his personality: he was a geek with mesmeric technical skills, but he was also a gifted criminal who attended to every last detail and left nothing to chance. It was also possible that Cha0 was the collective name of a well-organised syndicate, although linguistic analysis strongly suggested that only one person was actually formulating his posts and messages on the Internet.

So when Bilal got the message from Istanbul that Cha0 was ‘one of the big boys’, he was not only worried, but he knew that from now on he would have to tread carefully even in a country that was modernising as fast as Turkey.

After the millennium Turkey had become an increasingly attractive venue for hackers, crackers and cyber criminals. In the late 1990s much cyber criminal activity had clustered in certain regions of the so-called BRIC countries. An economist from Goldman Sachs had conferred this acronym on Brazil, Russia, India and China as the leading countries of the emerging markets, the second tier of global power after the G8 (though, politically, Russia straddles the two).

The BRICs shared important social and economic characteristics. Their economies were moving and opening after several decades of stagnation. They had large populations whose combined efforts registered huge growth rates, while a resurgence in exuberant and sometimes aggressive nationalism accompanied the transition to the status of dynamic global actor. Their education systems offered excellent basic skills. But, combined with extreme inequalities of wealth, this spawned a new class of young men, poor and unemployed, but – in contrast to earlier generations – with great material aspirations as they absorbed the consumer messages that are an intrinsic part of globalisation. To meet these aspirations, a minority started beavering away in Internet cafés, safe from detection by law enforcement or indeed anyone else, where they found myriad online opportunities to educate themselves in the art of hacking.

Turkey qualified as an honorary BRIC, with an economy that, when

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