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The machines are only referred to as skimmers if they are being used for nefarious purposes, otherwise they are identical in function to those commercially available. Some skimmers are commercially produced and then acquired by criminals, others are home-made. The skimmer was the carding equivalent of James Watt’s steam engine at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. Over the next decade the great majority of credit-card and PIN numbers (dumps and wholes, as they are known) used fraudulently were skimming from ATMs and businesses around the world.

As a talented hacker, Dimitry also quickly noticed that the security systems developed by the nascent e-commerce community in the United States were primitive and easily cracked. How successful he was initially is entirely unclear. Dima liked to put it about that he had attained the gold standard of dollar millionaire before celebrating his seventeenth birthday. But never forget: lies are the most common currency of the Internet, and some of his cyber pals tell a different story.

‘He was greedy, deceitful and always drawn to the criminal milieu,’ blogged another Odessa hacker. ‘But the image of a successful million- aire was a far cry from reality.’

At this point, Dimitry disappeared, along with some of his more outrageous money-making schemes. Some months later he emerged from a chrysalis conferring anonymity as Script, a gloriously adept creature that flitted excitedly between two new websites, carder.org and carder.ru. These were little more than discussion forums where Russian hackers chewed the digital cud about how it might be possible to access the gazillions of dollars, pounds, yen and euros locked away behind credit cards. One of the original members of these sites remembered them as desultory, unstable and ultimately unrewarding.

Script, however, thought long and hard. If you had websites for all other manner of commerce, why not develop one for the inchoate trade in stolen credit-card numbers, bank accounts and other valuable data? He had a compelling motive for wanting to establish such a presence on the Web. For Script himself had begun to accumulate large amounts of these data, which he had neither the time nor the resources to exploit. He wanted to turn all his numbers into cash. He wanted to sell.

The timing was perfect. In the preceding five years, the Internet had hosted a furious growth in commercial activity. Nobody had fully antic- ipated this, because its originators had envisaged the Web as a tool to

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