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He was never able to control his spending, even later on when he was making considerable sums of money from his carding activities.

Mert’s friends were very important to him, in part because he sometimes found affection hard to come by. Whether he was aware of it or not, he used the Digiturk money to buy friendship – and there were plenty of twenty-somethings in Istanbul who were prepared to become pals with a young man apparently willing to underwrite expensive partying. Of course, whenever the money ran out, most of those characters went missing.

He was also desperate to prove that he was something special (which, given his computer talents, he undoubtedly was). And so he would systematically exaggerate his achievements. As this tendency developed, so did Mert’s consciousness start to float permanently between reality and fantasy. He seemed to lose the ability to distinguish between the two at an early stage. So complete was this meshing that, were he ever to take a lie-detector test, it would probably either go off the scale or not register a blip. Of course, in one respect this meant that he adapted to the culture of the Internet – the valley of lies – with ease.

Following a series of jobs in IT for various companies, Mert was taken on, in June 2006, by the local concession of Toshiba, whose personnel department failed to spot that he was under criminal investigation for the Digiturk fraud. Nonetheless, it did not take long for Mert’s colleagues at Toshiba to start wondering at some of his behaviour. They were also a touch suspicious of the certificate which purported to show that he had a degree in the Science of Cryptology from the University of Cambridge.

The trustees, so read the certificate, ‘have granted this diploma as evidence thereof given in the city of London in the Cambridge at the twenty-second day of june two thousand four’.

Perhaps they conferred the diploma in the Cambridge Arms in the City of London? Wherever the fictitious ceremony had taken place, the certificate was so crude that it hardly merited the epithet ‘counterfeit’.

One of his colleagues at Toshiba’s IT department was struck by how often Mert boasted about his relationship with National Intelligence. He, too, had offered occasional assistance to the spooks, especially in the late 1990s when the Agency had yet to develop its own effective cyber division. But one did not brag about such matters. Mert’s constant mutterings about his close relationship with intelligence really did jar.

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