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37
ZORRO UNMASKED

Just as Matrix was standing trial in June 2008, a radio reporter, Kai Laufen, was flicking through a copy of the MIT's* Technology Review when he spotted an article on cybercrime. Until this moment the investigative journalist from Karlsruhe in south-west Germany had no idea that it was becoming such a problem. He was intrigued and decided to discover the extent to which cybercrime was affecting Germany.

Cautious but thorough, Laufen began by researching the clauses in Germany's penal code relating to computer crime. Once he had found them, he dispatched emails to about fifty district and municipal courts around the country asking whether they were dealing with any such cases.

He received only a couple of replies, but conveniently one of them referred to a case of credit-card fraud at a local court in Göppingen, a small backwater in Baden-Württemberg, just a short drive from where Laufen lived. A young man, Detlef Hartmann, was awaiting sentencing on thirteen charges of having used cloned credit cards.

The story didn't sound particularly interesting, but Laufen decided nonetheless to contact the provincial police in Stuttgart, and before long the basics of cybercrime were being explained to him by Inspector Frank Eissmann. In passing he said that the FBI had assisted his Department IV in the investigation of Hartmann.

The day after Detlef received a nineteen-month suspended sentence on 2nd July, Kai wrote to him requesting an interview, sent quaintly

* Massachusetts Institute of Technology, not to be confused with the acronym of Turkey's National Intelligence Agency.

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