📸

distribute them. Mularski and Şen had uncovered some evidence suggesting that his products were going as far abroad as the United States, New Zealand and South America, and that some were bulk purchases. In that event, he was unlikely to be using personal couriers. Given the numbers he was beginning to shift, this was probably prohi bitively complicated. Bilal pondered the reasons for the increase in productivity, but drew a blank.

He was unaware that one year earlier, in the late spring of 2007, Cha0 had fallen out with Dron, the Canadian skimmer specialist whom the Secret Service and Detective Spencer Frizzell of the Calgary Police were preparing to arrest. Cha0 claimed that Dron was ‘a difficult char acter’ who irritated his customers and had therefore sullied the good reputation of DarkMarket. The many positive messages about Dron’s service suggested that Cha0’s motivation may have been different — certainly other carders on the board maintained that Cha0 had delib erately targeted Dron for his own reasons.

About a month before the young Canadian skimming expert and salesman was picked up by Detective Frizzell, Cha0, using his position as administrator, announced that Dron would be excluded from Dark Market and would not be allowed back. Cha0 could now activate his plan to dominate the skimming market and move into action.

DarkMarket had provided a vital platform for Dron’s wares — a large number of his devices were sold to carders who had spotted his paid adverts on the board. DarkMarket was also used as the primary adver tising vehicle for CrimeEnforcers.com, through which Cha0 was selling his own skimmers. Cha0 also offered packaged solutions to wannabe cyber criminals, including training, manuals and all the equipment needed for a start-up operation.

But once he had removed Dron from the equation, he changed his business model: interested parties were no longer at liberty to purchase his skimmers; they had to hire them instead. Cha0 would send them out, but with a little added modification.

After Dron’s expulsion, Cha0 was in a position to jack up the unit price of the skimmers — from now on they would cost $7,000 to hire, up from $5,000 to buy. For this, clients would receive a PIN pad along with the skimmer. They would install the skimmer on the mouth of an ATM and lay the PIN pad over the existing one. When bank customers inserted their cards and typed in their PINs, these were

📸