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astonishing achievement: sending the first ever amateur signals from North Korea. He was fêted from America across Europe to Australia for this ham-radio first, drawing large crowds of fans when he appeared at their conventions in the 1990s. Good-looking and exceptionally articulate, he was instinctively liked by people, and everyone wanted to be his friend.

Boa came across CarderPlanet while surfing the Web in the autumn of 1999 and was immediately impressed by its entrepreneurial, if chaotic spirit. Living on Malta, he already had a successful global busi- ness that sold high-end surveillance, counter-surveillance and anti- terrorist technology to politicians and businessmen in more than sixty countries around the world.

Aware of Boa's professional experience and organisational ability, Script invited him to join 'The Family' after a few months. Struck by Script's drive and energy after he first spotted the website in early 2002, Boa agreed to join CarderPlanet. 'When Boa came on board, he completely reanimated the Planet,' remembered one of the youngsters who had moved to the Planet. 'He was responsible for the slick design and introduced a number of new sections. He became a local celebrity.'

At the same time, Boa agreed with Script that he would set up a second website, Boa Factory, whose activities would complement the work of CarderPlanet while emphasising different sectors of the trade - Boa Factory was known, amongst other things, as a specialist producer of counterfeit passports and ID cards, as well as developing a larger wholesale trade in cloned credit cards and dumps. Whereas Boa was exclusively a business site, CarderPlanet emphasised the social aspect of the underground where individual carders could meet, chat, buy and sell on the Web.

Boa Factory developed a revolutionary tool, subsequently adopted by CarderPlanet, that enabled the growth of cybercrime on an industrial scale. The greatest challenge facing cyber thieves lay in the knowledge that the person they were doing business with was also a criminal and, ipso facto, untrustworthy. Boa devised the escrow system, known initially as the Warrant Service, to solve the problem. A vendor would provide the escrow officer with a sample of his wares (a dozen or so credit card numbers and PINs) while the potential buyer would send the money to him at the same time. The escrow officer would then test the wares and, if they delivered the cash as promised, he would release the money

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