📸

credit cards because at a time of virtually 0 per cent interest rates, they were still gaily charging anywhere between 5 and 30 per cent. In Britain the head of Barclaycard confessed to a parliamentary Select Committee that he did not 'borrow on credit cards because it is too expensive.'

Other parts of the globe were less inclined to be moulded by plastic. Western Europe had traditionally eschewed the buccaneer economics that had so bewitched America and Britain. As a consequence, credit- card ownership was much lower, along with the level of personal debt. In Eastern Europe there was neither sufficient capital spread across the population nor a secure banking industry to administer credit cards. Plastic was a rarity in the former communist world, an executive toy for the New Russians - that tiny proportion of the population who had made breathtaking fortunes by ripping off their countries and compa- triots during the transition from communism to capitalism.

But in the Anglo-Saxon casino economics of the 1990s and 2000s, plastic was the closest invention to printing money ever devised by financial institutions and they were not slow to excavate this rich lode of capital. Tons of leaflets were sent daily to addresses in the Western world exhorting people to sign up for credit cards or to exchange an existing debt for a new account that would not charge interest for six months. For three or four years more diligent consumers were able to secure interest-free credit as they transferred their outstanding balance from one card to the next, while the banks became ever more frantic in their attempts to secure new customers.

So many cards. So much money with which to play. Since large electronic wads of the stuff were sloshing around on the Web, it was perhaps no surprise that it began to attract the attention of cyber men from the East who were short on cash, but brimming with technical ingenuity. One of them was Script, eighteen-year-old Dimitry Golubov from Odessa.

And so it was that CarderPlanet was born.

📸