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impressive job in tracking most cybercrime stories, including Dark-Market. Indeed, he brought the same ruthless zeal to the job that he did to his previous occupation as a hacker – a career that ended in a criminal conviction. And so Poulsen did not burn after reading. On Monday 13th October he published. Master Splyntr was dead.

For his part, Keith Mularski was furious when Wired published his name – the trust that he had built up with so many carders was instantly lost. He had closed the DarkMarket board a couple of weeks earlier because JiLsi’s registration of the domain name was about to expire. Had Master Splyntr attempted to re-register it, a curious hacker might have used the opportunity to uncover his identity.

The DarkMarket operation was the opening phase in a long-term plan by law enforcement to infiltrate the world of cyber criminality. In fifteen months, prior to the publication of Mularski’s name in Wired magazine, the FBI, SOCA and the other police agencies involved had been careful to pick off individuals here and there. They had deliberately decided not to go for a large-scale sweep of DarkMarket members, in contrast to the tactics used by the Secret Service in 2004 with Shadow-crew. Master Splyntr fully intended to return with his reputation enhanced, armed with his large database of carders and their activities. That plan was now blown out of the water.

Not that Mularski’s efforts had been in vain – in a remarkable example of cross-border cooperation among disparate police forces, they had caught one of the biggest fish in the carding world, Cha0, and had arrested dozens of others, some of whom were already convicted, most of whom were awaiting trial.

But neither Agent Mularski nor anybody else was in a position to blame Dietmar Lingel. He had not allowed the identity of Master Splyntr to slip into the court papers for the Matrix case, as the officer from Dezernat 3.5 had alleged.

That distinction belonged to Detective Frank Eissmann, Lingel’s boss, who later confessed that he had ‘made a big mistake’ in submitting the document to the State Prosecutor as part of the police evidence against Matrix. It was Eissmann’s error that led to Kai Laufen identifying Mularski, which in turn triggered the collapse of the long-term operation against the carders.

Dietmar Lingel, however, remained suspended and heard nothing from his employers until Dezernat 3.5 informed him in September

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