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29
SOFTLY SOFTLY

Istanbul, Turkey, 2008

Still anxious that Cha0 might enjoy protection from above, Bilal Şen nonetheless persevered with his investigation. He promised to maintain close contact with Agent Mularski in Pittsburgh once he had returned to Istanbul. They had discussed the possibility of requesting the use of Cha0’s Escrow Service on DarkMarket to see if they could smoke him out that way, but quickly concluded that this was too laborious and unlikely to yield results.

The other thing they knew about him, of course, was that he traded in skimmers. Digitally he was impossible to track down. But if Cha0 was selling these skimmers, Bilal reasoned, there were two weak points to his operation – their manufacture and their dispatch.

Skimming ATMs was becoming such a popular sport in Turkey that ever more police officers were now schooled in how to spot them, once they had been put in place. Many of the devices were shoddily built and installed by amateurs. But flicking through the arrest and confiscation reports, the Inspector had observed that in some areas their design and style were not only improving, but it appeared that they were being manufactured in large numbers. Somewhere there must be a factory. Intelligence alerted Şen to the possible presence of skimmer factories in Romania and Bulgaria, so he sent out assistance requests to their respective police forces. The other possibility was that Cha0’s operation was masquerading as a legitimate business and ordering them from licensed manufacturers of card readers inside Turkey.

Once he had acquired the skimmers, Cha0 would somehow have to

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