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by post rather than email. Detlef and his parents resisted the journalist's first few attempts to talk to him, but after three months they relented, so in early October Kai found himself sitting opposite the young man over a cup of coffee.

Kai Laufen was no novice. Born in northern Germany, he was brought up partly in Brazil and spoke fluent Portuguese, Spanish and English. He had worked throughout South America and knew a thing or two about organised crime and gangsters. But now he could scarcely believe his ears as Detlef regaled him with the tale of Matrix001 and his adventures in a virtual world where everyone boasted peculiar names and communicated in a hybrid English - part gangster, part anarchist and part Tolkien - as they bought and sold stolen financial details.

Kai readily grasped the implications of this new style of wrongdoing. With the aid of the Internet, the perpetrators could commit crimes thousands of miles away, on a multitude of unknown victims who might or might not discover that their privacy had been violated and their money or identity stolen.

Yet if it was so foolproof, Kai wondered, how did Detlef manage to get himself arrested? 'Simple,' he replied, 'one of my fellow administrators, who I worked with over many months, was an FBI agent. He was tracking me and he alerted the German police.' The journalist thought the young man was perhaps exaggerating his own importance, so he asked him whether he had any documentary evidence to support that. 'Yes,' said Detlef, 'I'll send it to you.'

A few days later Detlef sent Laufen the prosecutor's statement outlining the state's case against the young man, written in the German language's inimitable legalese:

As evidenced by the investigation dossier, this administrator who in the final analysis had complete control over all arrangements at least from June 2006 onwards was the FBI Agent, Keith Mularski, who had offered to host the server in order to gather more accurate information about the buyers and sellers. I refer here to the Case Document 148, File 1, in which Mr Keith Mularski informs the investigating officer of the Regional Police, Frank Eismann [sic], as follows: Master Splynter [sic] is me. That the user Master Splynter [sic] ran the server is proven by Case Document

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