How I Stole a Million. Confession of a Repentant Carder.

[Man]

A very interesting story. Maybe someone has read it.

Abstract
During the investigation of the largest theft of personal information in the history of the United States, Belarusian citizen Sergei Pavlovich came into the spotlight and was found guilty of selling stolen bank card data. In 2008, a group of 11 people, citizens of different countries, were charged with a number of crimes related to illegally penetrating the computer networks of trading companies and stealing data from 170 million credit cards. The brains behind these operations was Albert Gonzalez, an informant for the American intelligence services. According to US authorities, the damage from the actions of the "11 Friends of Gonzalez" exceeded one billion US dollars.
The book is based on real events and was written by the author while serving a 10-year prison sentence.
16+ (In accordance with the Federal Law of December 29, 2010, No. 436-FZ.)
The loser now will be the first later.

Preface
My wife is sure that this book is dedicated to her. My mother thinks that I wrote my story because I can't sit idle and because I am trying to solve a puzzle that has been bothering me for many years. My best friend is convinced that I am crazy for telling such a story. That even in prison I thirst for fame and want to remind people of myself in a world in which I believe less and less every day. My editor thinks that I hope for a pardon...
These people know me well, understand me and sometimes read my thoughts. But the truth is that this book was written for you and only for you. I am not such an idiot as to believe that they will take me, convicted three times, guilty on all counts, especially dangerous, etc., and let me go. And I am not a hypocrite as to write here that I deserve it.
I will sit for ten years. My beautiful wife will most likely leave me. My beloved grandfather, who raised me, will die without ever seeing me free. My mother will grow old, more from grief than from age. For my friends, I will become a ghost with whom there is nothing to talk and with whom it is somehow awkward to share the joy of the birth of a child or impressions of a trip. I myself will change, I will become a psycho with yellow skin and bad teeth. A moral monster, nervous, angry and cruel. My life can no longer be saved or changed. But your destiny may be different...

Chapter 1
Knockin' on Heaven's Door
The most important criterion for any business is profitability, and cybercrime is no exception.
Eugene Kaspersky
My name is Sergey Pavlovich. Many people know me online as PoliceDog, panther[757], Fallen Angel, diplomats. They say I stole $36 million. What would you spend that kind of money on? Perhaps, with millions, your life would be special, bright and happy? Could you make your craziest dream come true? I spent money sometimes ineptly, sometimes very skillfully. The most beautiful way to part with money is, of course, women. But the most pleasant and, probably, the right one is to become Santa Claus. To save the life of a seriously ill person by paying for his operation in Germany, for his mother - a new car, for his nephew - a computer and a scooter, to send his girlfriend's mother on a fabulous trip to the ocean, and the mother of his ex-girlfriend there too. To lend money, knowing that it will not be repaid. Sometimes it is more pleasant to fulfill someone else's dream than your own... Such trifles, but I will say: it is cool to be Santa Claus. And lying on the bunk and looking at the peeling ceiling for fifteen hours a day is not cool at all. But I lie and look... At that moment, I don’t care that I was arrested, that I’m in a cell with thirteen other prisoners, that I can be “locked up” for many years. It’s not scary. Believe it or not.
Probably, at that moment my brain successfully evacuated me from the situation I found myself in. I didn’t hear or see anything around me. Instead of a gray ceiling, there was a picture in front of my eyes: Dima looking out the window, Katya silently cutting bread at the table, Fidel telling some joke and trying to take a boar’s head off the wall... The door opens, and this cop comes in, and four more in civilian clothes with him... “Good evening”... That’s it... I kept replaying that moment in my head over and over again: “Good evening”... What does that mean? What does all this mean, why am I here?! That is, it is clear that “a thief should go to prison”, but I was so careful… I was a super-cautious Santa!
There are two possible options: the first is that I made a mistake. The second is that someone turned me in. A lump got stuck in my throat. If someone betrayed me, it could only be a close person. And that means no. It’s impossible… I closed my eyes and remembered: the last deals, clients, dumps, PIN codes… Where could I have screwed up? The longer I lay under the gray ceiling, the more I began to believe in betrayal. Like Agatha Christie in a fireplace detective story, I suspected everyone. And our detective story really was a fireplace one. At that moment (“good evening”) I took skewers with ready-made shashlik out of the fireplace. And everyone who was at the dacha that “good evening” was hanging around in the living room by the fire one way or another.
We were in the village of Lipen, 100 kilometers from Minsk. Our dacha is the last house on the street. Behind it began an endless forest with wild boars and foxes, where my grandfather served as a forester all his life. This was my girlfriend Katya's dacha. We already lived in the capital, but we constantly went to Lipen. How I loved this dacha...
Two things seemed strange to me. First: why was it necessary to arrest me at the moment when I left Minsk, and turn the detention into an off-site special operation? I was not hiding. In Minsk, they could have come to my home and put handcuffs on me in the same way. Only much easier. Or maybe they wanted to arrest me at the moment when I was having a drink with a group of people and relaxed? Well, then they should have acted two days earlier, when we celebrated the anniversary of my DumpsMarket website. Serious carders from all over the CIS and beyond gathered for the “birthday”. As the creator of DumpsMarket, I was the birthday boy. Alcohol flowed like a river, whores danced on the tables, guys snorted cocaine… If the cops had shown up at that party, they would have been in for a pleasant surprise. But for some reason, they were not interested in the criminal sabbath. Which means they knew nothing, operational information about me appeared suddenly.
The second point that raised doubts: on that day, September 16, 2004, we gathered in Lipen in a small group. We did not discuss on the phone where we were going, I only said: "Out of town." I did not explain the directions to anyone - we just left Minsk in a motorcade and were there an hour later. I had literally just recently bought a new Mercedes and was happily driving along Belarusian roads, the quality of which can only be compared to German autobahns.
- Senior Lieutenant ***, your documents! Sergei Alexandrovich, your speed limit is exceeded by... Have a safe trip, Sergei Alexandrovich! Be more careful on the road!
If that lieutenant, who pulled me over for speeding almost at the very end of the journey, had known that my phone was being tapped or, even worse, that I was being followed, he would not have taken twenty bucks from me. But now we are not talking about him. Maybe someone on the phone did give me the address, and that is why the task force rushed to the Mogilev region? Or maybe they really were following us from Minsk… Screw it! It probably wasn’t that hard for the cops to find out my location, given their capabilities. Although it’s still strange…
So, the guests. The heroes of my fireplace detective story.
= Katya is my girlfriend (actually, she’s Katya number two, but here, as the owner of the dacha, she’s number one).
= Dima Burak, aka Graf, is my cousin and my closest friend in life. We are connected not only by blood, but also by many common affairs. I have no secrets from my brother. He is my right hand.
= Sergey Storchak, aka Fidel, is a native of Odessa, came to Minsk for the anniversary of DumpsMarket and stayed. He liked it here. Fidel’s birthday is on September 17th. That’s what we’re celebrating. Fidel is one of our main partners. I don’t trust him very much, so Dima does business with him.
= Ilya Saprykin, aka Postal. Twenty-three years old, a smart Jewish boy. He worked with us and was aware of many things. Before meeting me, he was mainly involved in "cashing out" small things.
Postal could have turned me in. He had enough information... And how could I have forgotten that he was going to the dacha separately from everyone else! At the last moment he broke away from the group, saying that he had business in Minsk... We left for Lipen without him. And only two hours later, when the bathhouse was already heated up, and the meat for the shashlik was strung on skewers, Ilya's dark blue BMW finally rolled into the yard.
A striking blonde, also I think Katya, got out of the car. "So that's what business detained him in Minsk," I thought, looking at the girl with interest. "Damn it, why am I remembering her! The blonde is definitely not a high-ranking policewoman, there are no such pretty ones." So, the next number...
= Saprykin's girlfriend, the blonde Katya.
= Kirill Kalashnikov, aka kaiser. Kaiser is only 17 years old. He is not from around here. He worked with us, but lived in Russia, in Yekaterinburg. I also came to Minsk for the anniversary of my forum and, like Fidel, decided to stay for the party in Lipen.
I remember how the boys took pistols and went to the edge of the yard to shoot at cans. I also shot and hit more often than others. It was really exciting. I jumped on the rubber wheels dug into the ground around the flower beds, falling like an idiot. I probably had oxygen poisoning. Dima fired, and I pretended to be wounded. I hobbled a few meters and fell to the ground. My fingers felt the place where the bullet entered and pressed the pulsating stream of blood. You could feel my heart beating, even through my jacket. High clouds were flying across the sky. The air is so transparent in autumn, it would be a shame to die under such a beautiful sky. To lie on the golden leaves and cool off. I closed my eyes, I was no longer there. Maybe I should have died then. But they stopped me. First the scent of Euphoria by Calvin Klein, then warm, wet lips. When I opened my eyes, the sky was gone. Everything was covered by Katya’s face. Huge, gentle eyes. One look like that is enough to make your heart stop.
— Do you love me?
— I love Katya. Are you Katya?
The world became alive and safe, like on a canvas.
No, Katya could not betray. Although she had her reasons for that. I cheated on her, I did not love her, I… wasn’t that enough?! At that moment, when the men in civilian clothes entered our house, she was the only one who did not lose her head. In response to “good evening,” she walked right up to these guys:
— Hello. What’s the matter?
— The police. Whose house is this?
— My father’s…
And for some reason she repeated our address, in a calm voice she said the last name, first name, and patronymic of her father, the owner of the house. This calmed me down. As if we thought they had made a mistake and in the dark got the wrong village hut, but in fact they were going to visit the tractor driver across the street or wanted to ask their neighbor for some fresh milk… And we don’t have a cow, or moonshine either. Goodbye, guys. But the cops were in no hurry to leave.
“Did you shoot? The neighbors complained that they heard shots,” the only policeman in uniform explained the reason for his visit. For some reason, he was holding his service Makarov pistol in his hand.
“We were shooting at cans with an air gun,” Katya began in the same calm and reasonable tone, but Ilya Saprykin interrupted her and rattled off,
“Do you want me to run to the car? I’ll show you what we were shooting with. Did you know that you don’t need a permit to use an air gun?
What a hysterical moron! Even a child knows that an air gun doesn’t require a license, and the garbage is even more so.” They seemed to have gotten tired of putting on a comedy act. Before I could blink, one of the “men in black” came up to me and put handcuffs on me. Everyone was told not to disperse, to be in one room.
Dima looked scared. He sat on the windowsill silently and looked at me, as if asking: what to do? Among us brothers, I was always the eldest. Although in fact, Dima was born three months before me.
No, Dima is not a traitor. He would rather cut off his own hand. He is tied to me in all cases. Someone betrayed us both. However, Dima was not handcuffed. The last time I saw my brother was at the Minsk Main Department of Internal Affairs. We were interrogated one by one. The door accidentally opened - Dima was sitting in the office opposite. He waved his hand at me, as if to say, everything will be fine. I noticed that his fingers were covered in black paint, just like mine. Dima definitely has no reason (no motive) to drown me...
Or does he? The thought that came to my mind made me feel sick. The gray ceiling of the pretrial detention center cell began to float, circles appeared. Are those tears? I tried to pull myself together: I can't become paranoid. Another voice inside my mind objected: "But you can't miss any details either! Things like that happen in life, so take everything into account." I closed my eyes and began to remember.
Nine months ago... New Year's... January 1, 2004, there, at the dacha, I wake up for the first time in the same bed with Katya. We had spontaneous sex. And now I feel awkward. Because Katya was my brother's girlfriend for many years. They recently broke up, I don't know why. I don't know how serious it is either. Katya is sleeping naked next to me... Sober, I'm embarrassed to lie with her. I get up quietly so as not to wake her. I step on something... A bra! What a wonderful person I am, starting with the letter M! What, there aren't enough girls? Especially since I have a girlfriend in Kiev. And not just one. I go down the stairs, I need to be alone. As luck would have it, I meet Dima, who is washing the dishes.
- Do you have any cigarettes? - I ask my brother.
- Were out. Let me pour you some coffee? Do you want to eat? I can warm up some chicken and potatoes.
- Damn, Dima! It's eight in the morning. You're washing the dishes. And you don't mind warming up some chicken for me? Of course, I don't want to even once. But tell me, are you normal at all?
- For your sake, I never feel lazy...
He sat down opposite me and smiled so openly and kindly that I couldn't help but say:
- I slept with Katya. What should I do?
- With your Katya? Are you back together?
- No, with your Katya, yesterday. I was drunk... No, no. It's not that I... I actually like her.
- Well, she's good. You know that.
It sounded like a blessing. Besides, Dima smiled again. The feeling of guilt that had been hanging like a stone on my soul dissolved. In its place, there was an exciting anticipation of amorous flirtation. I thought: how good it is to have a brother. And male friendship. That morning, I still ate a piece of chicken, drank coffee with condensed milk, and behind the stove I found a pack of Marlboros. My brother and I sat in the kitchen, laughed, remembered our childhood, school, how we listened to Deep Purple... I always see people the way I want. Or maybe Dima was really hurt that morning and was hiding it? Then he could have hidden something else from me...
The operatives expressed a desire to inspect the house. Not to search, but to inspect, because a search requires a prosecutor's sanction. Saprykin began to nervously spin around the room, pretending to be an oppositionist at a demonstration whose rights were being violated, and he “would complain.” Postal could well have been a snitch… And his behavior was a distraction, so that everyone could see how he “puts cops in their place.” Later, he wilted, withdrew into himself, sat and bit his nails. His girlfriend seemed to have more self-control. Like a prostitute who ended up in a police station, she watched what was happening with dignity and even a smirk. Perhaps she even enjoyed the show. She understood that she was not a participant here, but a spectator. Looking ahead, I will say that this girl will still have a chance to be in our shoes - her father Andrei Malyshev, the head of the Fiat and Alfa Romeo dealerships, will be accused of non-payment of customs duties, flee Belarus, and be put on the international wanted list.
Fidel smoked silently. It was difficult to understand what was on his mind. He was probably thinking, "Here's a present from my Belarusian friends..."
Kaiser blinked his eyes in fear. His face read, "I'll tell you everything, I'll turn everyone in, just let me leave Belarus."
I've thought about a possible arrest many times and even scared myself. It's like when you're a child and you imagine that your mother has died and you feel sorry for yourself. It's a line that's scary to look beyond, but it's nice to realize that you can pinch yourself at any moment and the nightmare will go away. But today it's all real. And I admit, I was scared. It was as if my brain had been turned off. I sat down on a stool and tried to imagine that this was a dream. The weight of the handcuffs immediately brought me back to reality. Suddenly, I smelled Euphoria again. Katya was looking at me:
"Bunny, can you hear me? Listen. What will happen to you is unknown. There's only one thing you can do now: eat." Because when will there be another opportunity like this… — Katya’s eyes filled with tears. — Well, you get the idea… They
were almost forcibly shoving pilaf, shashlik, and salad into me. Katya hid a crust of bread in my jacket pocket. I watched her and was surprised at how quickly she got into the role of the Decembrist’s wife.
They found the “plastic.”
Are you curious about what it’s like to be in a pretrial detention center for the first time?
First, a "sedimentation tank." Then a general cell. The Minsk pretrial detention center smells of sauerkraut. You won't find such a smell in any sports locker room or any gym. You'll be ready to pay any price to get out of here.
I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. At night, instead of sleeping, I sank into a delirious state. Even in my sleep, I was looking for a way out, trying to think through the situation. What should I tell the investigator? How can I pass a note with important instructions to the outside world? Five days passed like this. On September 21, I was completely exhausted and fell asleep. I fell into darkness, where there was no smell of cabbage, damp walls, or dull despair...

Chapter 2
Lawyer
- Here, take a look, - some unfamiliar woman threw a newspaper article on the table in front of me.
Krasnodar police searched for a Belarusian carder all over the world.
September 22, 2004.
On September 17, a carder who had been put on the international wanted list was detained in Osipovichi (Belarus). The arrest operation was carried out by the Department for Detecting Crimes in the Sphere of High Technologies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Belarus and the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs of Minsk. The young man, suspected of making and selling counterfeit credit cards, had been wanted by Belarusian law enforcement officers since 2002. In addition, the 21-year-old Belarusian had already left his mark in Ukraine, Belgium, the USA and other countries. And the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs of Krasnodar Krai had put him on the international wanted list "for committing crimes against information security," reports Sovetskaya Belorussiya. The 21-year-old resident of the village of Gatovo in the Minsk region was detained in Osipovichi at the dacha of his friends. The arrest took place at half past twelve at night. During the search, more than twenty counterfeit bank credit cards were found at the carder.
“The so-called white ‘plastic’,” the information and public relations department of the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs of the Minsk City Executive Committee reported. “That is, the cards had PIN codes, but without the ‘identification marks’ of the issuing bank and payment system, holograms and other levels of protection.” The investigation will establish whether he was planning to use them himself or was preparing them for sale. But neither of these plans were destined to come true this time.
According to BelTA, the detainee was the head of an international group of hackers and carders who stole the details of bank credit cards of clients of foreign banks, after which they copied them to the magnetic strip of the cards. The money was usually cashed with the help of front men through ATMs or stores in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
“A normal track record. What kind of white ‘plastic’ is this and where did you get the PIN codes for the cards?
” “Here we go…” I looked at her with distrust. — We haven’t even had time to get acquainted, and already there are questions.
- Sergey Alexandrovich, I am not an investigator, of course, but I will ask similar questions. In order to protect you as well as possible, I must have all the information. I understand that you may be wary of my questions, you have probably already heard in the cell that all lawyers "play the same game with the cops", "a crow won't peck out another crow's eye", etc., - the woman deftly switched to prison "frankenstein", and even her voice did not change.
I was not in the mood to turn myself in, and she herself had just named the reason. Apparently, it was written on my face, because the lawyer suddenly stood up and dragged the chair closer to the light. Finally, I was able to get a good look at her. A slightly plump woman, somewhere in her fifties. She could have been my mother by her age. A high forehead, intellectual glasses, an old-fashioned hairstyle, pupils that were probably huge because of the semi-darkness. And he looks at me without blinking, like a cobra.
- Listen, Seryozha, your brother hired me. He's very worried about you.
If any words could have thrown me off balance at that moment, my lawyer just said them. I spent a week in the pretrial detention center and knew nothing about Dima. I guessed that Katya was released right away - after all, she had nothing to do with it, but what happened to my brother, where he was, whether he was interrogated, where they took him after the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs - I didn't know any of that. Maybe he's sitting in the next cell and just as ignorant of me...
- So everything's okay with him?
- Yes. He's not in any danger. Unlike you.
For the umpteenth time in my life, I thought that something unreal was happening to me. An ashtray nailed to the table, a lamp in my face, a strange woman... And where is my mother? Maybe she’ll just hug me, I’ll burst into tears like I did when I was a kid, ask for forgiveness, and they’ll let me go home? Or maybe I’ll just pinch myself and wake up in my own bed? The lawyer must have sensed the moment and continued imperiously, now on a first-name basis, having forgotten my patronymic:
“I need to know everything as it is! How did you find out the passwords to other people’s credit cards?”
I quietly pinched myself under the table. I gathered my strength and looked straight into the eyes of my “cobra”:
“Not so fast. Can I see your ID?
” “Yes, please,” she reached into the inside pocket of her vest and pulled out a badge with the number of the office we were in, and her service card.
“Nesterovich Galina Arkadyevna,” I read in the booklet. “Legal consultation office of the Central District of Minsk.”
“Well, are you convinced that I’m not a policeman in disguise?” Galina Arkadyevna asked with a smile.
— You never know...
— Then I repeat my question: how did you find out the passwords to other people's credit cards?
— What other passwords?! Do you have any idea what a credit card is?
— Well, I have a credit card...
The lawyer tried to laugh it off, but she was clearly embarrassed and finally looked away:
— To be honest, I don’t know anything about computers, and I only got a credit card two weeks ago.
The zipper of the lock flashed, some papers rustled, and Galina Arkadyevna pulled out a card from the depths of her handbag.
— You can sleep peacefully. This is a VISA Electron debit card, the most common card in Russia and Eastern Europe. With such a card, you are in no danger — carders like me are rarely interested in them.
— What kind are they interested in?
— The ones that have money on them. For example, VISA Signature — I withdrew $9900 from them at a time. “Bin” was, I think, 4 14750.
— Not bad! How much did you earn per month?
— Mmm… Well, somewhere around $30 thousand (she almost blurted out the real hundred).
— So, you are a carder… — Galina Arkadyevna said thoughtfully.
— Yes. Card thieves call each other carders in their circle. We call our victims cardholders (from the English cardholder - "card owner").
- What is Signature?
- VISA Signature is a personalized card for very wealthy people.
- And "bin"?
- BIN (Bank Identification Number) is the first six digits of the card number, by which you can determine the issuing bank that issued it, and its type. All information about "bins" is stored in special databases - VISA Interchange Directory, Mastercard Member Directory, etc. For example, BIN 3 71535 is American Express CENTURION, and if you enter 4 14750, VISA Signature, which I already mentioned, into the database, you will see something like this:
BIN: VISA ® 4 14750
Issuer: Merryl Lynch Bank USA
Issuer Phone: 800 - 637-7455
Country: United States
Funding Type (account type: Debit, Credit, Prepaid): CREDIT
Card Type (card type: Classic, Cold, etc.): SIGNATURE
A bank is not the only issuer of a plastic card. Credit unions and even large stores (discount cards) issue their own cards.
- What is this "account type"? You said that my Electron is a debit...
— By account type, all cards are divided into credit and debit. Credit cards contain the bank's money that you spend and then return once a month. The bank charges a certain percentage for using the money. When you open a debit card, the account is zero, and you will only have access to the amount that you put into the account, that is, your hard-earned money. Prepaid cards, sometimes called gift cards, give the owner the right to receive goods or services for a certain amount indicated on the card. Prepaid is translated from English as "prepaid". In fact, this is a regular debit card, only without the owner's first and last name on it. In the countries of the Soviet Union, any bank plastic card is often called a "credit card" or "credit card", but this is not entirely correct. Your Electron is generally aimed at students and young people, and we mainly use it for calculating salaries...
- And my husband has some other VISA, a higher class...
- Above Electron is Classic - a card for clients who already have experience with bank cards. Mastercard has a similar card - Mastercard Standard. These are the most common cards in the world. By the way, they allow you to pay online, unlike Electron. Cards of the Gold and Platinum series are prestigious cards that emphasize the solidity of their owners. Corporate cards are intended for medium and large companies whose employees often go on business trips. With the help of these cards, company management can effectively control the expenses of their employees. VISA Business — cards for making various everyday payments: business trip expenses, paying entertainment expenses, bills for office equipment, office supplies, software, etc. Technically, the classic, gold, platinum, corporate and other cards are no different except for the design and cost of issue and maintenance. Many stores, insurance companies, car rental companies provide discounts and bonuses to owners of gold and platinum cards, although most cardholders do not even know about them. In addition, it often happens that you can withdraw more money from an American classic than from a gold or platinum.
— Why is that?
— I think many Americans, like Russians, strive to get Gold/Platinum cards more for show — the Classic is enough for everyday use. But it will be easier to pick up a hot babe at a bar if you flash a platinum credit card in front of her. Or put the key to the Ferrari on the counter...
- I have VISA, you mentioned Mastercard... What other credit cards exist? VISA, you mentioned Mastercard... What other credit cards exist, you mentioned Mastercard... What other credit cards exist, and especially which of them is included in your accusation?
— The world's leading payment system is VISA, it accounts for about 57% of bank cards in the world. The main competitor, Mastercard, has about 26%, the third system, American Express, the leader in tourism and entertainment, has a little more than 13%. There are also JCB (Japan Credit Bureau), Diners Club and Discover cards.
— Which of them are the most popular with carders?
— Any that have money on them. True, AmEx, Diners and JCB to a lesser extent — due to the low prevalence of cards of these payment systems in Russia and Europe. I have never seen Discover in person. In my accusation, only VISA and Mastercard are mentioned.
— And what are the most prestigious credit cards? Which one did you have?
— Me?! — I was even a little surprised by the naivety of the question. — None — banks and payment systems, no matter how hard they try, are not able to ensure the safety of money on cards. Besides, it is a “light” — tracking the history of your purchases, as well as your movements, is not difficult. And we are still fighters on the invisible front… As for VIP-level cards, these are VISA Infinite and Mastercard World Signia, and the most prestigious cards — a symbol of their owner’s belonging to the top of society — are black: VISA Black Card, black Diners and American Express Centurion. They are available only to a limited number of very wealthy clients. For one opening of Centurion — the most prestigious card in the world — you will have to pay $5 thousand, the annual subscription fee is $2500. People who spend $250 thousand a year and more can count on receiving this card. Of course, you get a lot in return: all kinds of insurance services, discounts of up to 50% on hotels, tickets and car rentals, table reservations in restaurants, even when “there are no seats”, the opportunity to use first-class waiting rooms at the largest airports in the world regardless of the category of the air ticket, 24-hour concierge service, an unlimited credit limit and much more. By gaining access to closed clubs for the "powers that be", the owner of a black "plastic" moves up a social ladder. Often, this becomes the main reason for purchasing a premium card.
- All this is, of course, very interesting, - the lawyer interrupted me, - but we have strayed from the topic. What is written in your indictment? "Organized the theft of property at trade and service enterprises in the city of Minsk by entering false information into the computer system (payment with counterfeit VISA and Mastercard bank cards) for a total of $9 thousand, supervised the commission of such thefts by Voropaev P. V. and Batyuk S. L." Everything is clear here, but what "false information" did you enter and where exactly?
— There is a common misconception among ordinary people that the balance is on the credit card, but this is not true — the money is not physically on it, the credit card is like a pass to the card account in the bank that issued it. In other words, it identifies the account holder — can he take the money from the chest that is in the bank. The seller swipes the card through the POS terminal (from the English Point of Sale — “sales outlet”) — a device that reads the information recorded on the magnetic strip of the card and contacts the bank to conduct the transaction, which connects to the processing center and transfers the data from your card there. Then the processing contacts the issuing bank that issued the card and receives confirmation or refusal in the form of a code. The code for successful authorization is 00 — APPROVED. Otherwise, they get a ban on the transaction, often played out in Hollywood movies ("sorry, your account is frozen" and a demonstrative cutting of the card with scissors). A payment system like VISA connects all the links of this chain together, for which it takes up to 3.5% of each transaction.
- This is understandable. But what does "false information" have to do with it?
- Very simple - the card is counterfeit, I am not its legal holder, which means that any payment of mine is a priori considered false.
- The cashiers did not guess that the "plastic" was fake?
- Of course not. The dump was real, and the money was written off from a real account. Only the plastic blank on which the dump was written was counterfeit.
- What is a dump?
- A dump is a set of information recorded on the magnetic strip of a credit card. It consists of three tracks. The first two are used directly for the card to work, and the third track is intended for recording various service information. The most important is the second track. The first track duplicates the main data of the second one - the card number, expiration date, CVV code, and also contains the name of the cardholder.
Track1: B4 55990 75607 84214 ^ SMITH / JOHN ^ 1 10210 10000 00000 00000 05270 00000
Track2: 4 55990 75607 84214 = 11021 01000 00527 00000
Code 101 after the card expiration date indicates that the card is international. If instead of it there is, for example, 201 - this means that the card is local, that is, by default it works only in the "home" country. Having track2 on hand, you can easily generate track1, but the opposite is quite difficult. To get cash from an ATM, only the second track is enough.
— Where did you get the dumps?
— There are three ways at the moment. Portable readers (cardreaders) are made or purchased — tools for reading the magnetic strip of a payment card. The smallest readers I have seen were the size of a matchbox and were made in Ukraine by engineers at Boa Factory. The devices are then distributed to cashiers in boutiques and expensive stores, waiters in restaurants, currency prostitutes, and they swipe the client card not only through a legal POS terminal, but also through their reader.
A large processing center of a bank or retail chain, through which payments from physical (not virtual) stores, hotels, restaurants are made, is hacked, and their client base is obtained. They are simply bought from those who got hold of them using one of the above methods.
— The dumps still need to be written to the credit card itself…
— Of course. For this, a special device called an encoder is needed. They are sold completely legally and cost $800–1000. The most common model in carding circles is the MSR 206. Connect it to a computer via a USB port, enter the dump into a simple program, swipe the card through the slot, and you have a magnetic copy of a card from some American "Buratino" in your hands. "
Can I go to the store now?" Galina Arkadyevna made a logical conclusion.
"No, it's too early to go to the store, since we do have a duplicate of the real card, but it's on a piece of white "plastic" (usually CR-80). The seller in the store will be very surprised if you offer him such a card.
"So what do you do?
"You make an agreement with the seller in some decent store, like: "Vasya, I have this thing, I'll come to you, take a laptop and a plasma TV, then we'll sell it and split the money in half." It works — restaurant, boutique and casino owners gave us 40-50% in cash of the amount they “rolled over,” and we told them that they needed to answer to their bank if any problems arose.
— For example, what kind?
— Sooner or later, the real cardholder will dispute the payment. They will complain to their bank, they will complain to VISA, and then some tough guys from the security service of the bank that installed the POS terminal in this casino will descend on our casino. They will come and say: “What are you, you scoundrel, “rolling” fake cards?” Well, here our oligarch should widen his eyes and say: “I don’t know anything. I’ll call the cashier who worked that evening.” He calls Masha. The bankers tell her:
— Did you check the expiration date of the card?
— Of course.
— Was the cardholder’s signature on the back?
— Yes. I even compared it with the signature in his passport. And he signed the slip in exactly the same way.
- What slip? - I had to explain everything to my lawyer like he was a first-grader.
— The receipt that comes out after paying for an item with a credit card is called a slip. All information about the purchase is printed on it: time, date, name of the organization, details of the place where the purchase was made. By the way, the data for the slip is taken from the first track. And if the dump absolutely doesn’t care what name you indicate in the first track — the real card owner or the name indicated in your “fake” passport, then you still need to write the original card number, otherwise the payment (transaction) will not go through. Otherwise, it would be nice: you simply get a “fake” passport, simply go with it to any bank in any country and just as simply open an account with a debit card. As a result, you have a credit card with the name of Zhenya Sokolov with $5 on it and a passport with the same name with your photo. Erase all the data from the magnetic strip, take a dump from those you have, change the name in the first track to Zhenya Sokolov, write this dump to the card and go ahead - at least to the bank, at least to the store. If you run out of money on this dump - erase it, prepare and write a new one. And so on, until all the banks and stores on the globe start looking for Zhenya Sokolov. Then you buy a new passport and in a circle again. Well, and if they start recognizing you by face - then only plastic surgery.
Galina Arkadyevna laughed.
- Bankers will ask whether the cashier checked the card number and surname on the check and the front surface of the card - the cashier will answer that, of course, yes, add that the card was not damaged and there were no signs of forgery, and this is the end of the "interrogation" - despite all the suspicions, the bank has no legal grounds to block the payment.
Of course, if the sellers in Minsk stores checked whether the data on the slip matched the numbers on the card itself, it would be impossible to turn an already used card into a reusable one, but in Belarus — a country of fearless idiots — cashiers everywhere "forgot" about the rules for the safe servicing of bank plastic cards, and I often managed to make purchases from dumps recorded on original but expired cards, or even on discount cards.
Businessmen who were in debt to criminal authorities and had no choice often got involved in working with white "plastic". Of course, we did not "milk" one point too often, otherwise the servicing bank could take away the terminal and we would be left without work at all.
- Wait, you said white "plastic". So in the accusation you have this "plastic", twenty pieces that were allegedly found on you ...
- Only not on me, but on Saprykin. And he told the cops that I gave them to him, gave them the PIN codes and asked to withdraw cash from Minsk ATMs (cash machines). I hope you know what a PIN is?
- I know, four digits, without which you can’t get cash from an ATM.
— True. But I’ll add. Firstly, a PIN code is often required when paying for purchases. And secondly, a PIN (Personal Identification Number) does not necessarily consist of four digits. Its length must be long enough to minimize the likelihood of it being picked up by trial and error, and on the other hand, short enough for the cardholder to remember it. Therefore, the length of a PIN code varies from four to two-PIN codes vary from four to two-codes vary from four to twelve digits. Most often, of course, four.
— Where did you get the “PINS”?
— “PINS”... Ordinary cardholders are sure (and bankers constantly tell them this) that it is impossible to hack or steal a PIN code, but I know ten ways to do it.
— Wow! Tell me, — Galina Arkadyevna showed genuine interest in this topic.
— Maybe not today? This is a topic for a separate conversation, and I’m tired, I’ll go to my cell.
— I can give your letters to your relatives…
— Oh, of course. I’ll write now.
“Malyava”, a short note, a letter “on the green” (without censorship)… You can write a lot in it, and even need to, but is it safe?.. The lawyer, of course, represents my interests, and my note will not fall into the hands of the investigator… Or will it? After all, the lawyer can be searched after he leaves me… However, there is no special choice, I write:
“Hello, Fox! I’m fine, I’m holding on, I’m more worried about you. I received your letter and have already written a reply - you will receive it soon. Please, number each of your letters in order, and I will do the same - so that later you don’t have to guess whether everything got through. I received the package, thank you very much. Contact Kaiser (u26 is my DM moderator), he owes us 10k, let him give it to you. Find Pitersky, he also has a tenner hanging around.
About Ilya Saprykin. Let him sell the office and return my share of the money invested, I don’t want to hear excuses.
Tell Dima to urgently (!) change the passwords to all my ICQs (there are probably trash hanging around in them) and warn all clients not to fall for trash pads. Greetings to all of ours. I love you very much.”
“Here, I wrote it. Just hide it more securely,” I asked the lawyer.
“I’ll read it, okay? ”
I nodded in agreement. Galina Arkadyevna quickly ran her eyes over the text, folded the “note” in four and shoved it… into her bra.
“Who would climb into an old woman’s bra?” she said, seeing my bewilderment.
I agreed.
— I'll come tomorrow, we'll continue to sort out your adventures, carder, — she said the last word deliberately slowly, as if she was trying to remember it. — How did the prison greet you?
— Everything's fine, thank you. Until tomorrow.

Chapter 3
Volodarka, Volodarka, it's very hot within your walls
The body is here, but the soul is far away,
I'll spit on the half-drunk convoy.
The body is here to report to the cops,
And the soul is where the mother gave birth.
Group "Butyrka". By stage
Do you want to know what a prison looks like? Do you really want to know?
Well...
There are "red" prisons, where all the power belongs to the administration, which means a strict regime of detention is imposed, and "black" ones, where the main issues are decided by influential prisoners, of course, with the knowledge and tacit consent of the prison authorities. Voldarka of that period, to my great relief, was a "black" prison, unlike, say, the Zhodino central prison closest to Minsk, "red" like the Soviet flag.
The first thing you get in the pre-trial detention center is a "shmon" (personal search), where they break the instep pads out of your shoes, which often cost more than the salary of a prison inspector, and take away prohibited items and objects, including belts and laces. You start to protest timidly, like, how can I be without laces, and the answer is: “It’s not allowed. What if you hang yourself in your cell?”, although even the furthest person from prison (and especially a cop) knows that all knitted things come apart in cells – sweaters, hats, and even synthetic socks (which make a particularly strong thread) – and you can make a ship’s rope out of all this stuff. And if you really want to, you can always hang yourself on a sheet.
“Take off your clothes. Your underwear too. Stretch out your arms. Squat three times” (what if you’re holding something forbidden between your buttocks)… “Get dressed, come in. Next.”
Ahead is the special unit - a full-face/profile photo, fingerprints again, personal data, including a long-forgotten nationality... Then you are escorted to the "assembly", also known as the "sedimentation area" - a semi-dark room of about 15 square meters, with a toilet in the corner, a tiny barred window without glass and a "stage" - a platform made of roughly knocked together boards, where 30-40 people usually sit, where you sit two or three, and sometimes - if, God forbid, you get there on holidays - for five or six days. My God, and this is where I have to live?! Oh-oh-oh, mommies...
The next day they took us to the shower, took blood from a vein (for testing for HIV, syphilis), did a fluorography. Some of them, according to a principle unknown to me, were dragged to the "godfather" - an operative of the pretrial detention center, whose duties include preventing disorder and escapes, as well as "developing" (eavesdropping, planting "brood hens") people of interest to the investigation. You could say I was very lucky: I spent only a day in the "sedimentation cell", and the next evening they would drag us out in groups of five or six and lead us somewhere.
The prison corridors, flooded with liquid electric light, looked surprisingly spacious. On both sides, even rectangles of metal doors with huge bolts and cell numbers darkened, and it was hard to imagine that behind each door was a cell that could sometimes accommodate up to thirty people.
First, they took us to a warehouse, where they gave us the required things: a mattress as thick as a duvet cover, on which more than one guest of the Minsk Alcatraz had probably died, a pillow, a half-woolen blanket worn to holes, an aluminum spoon with a handle broken off at the root, and the same mug without a handle. A little further down the corridor - and a moment later a heavy metal door with a built-in "feeder" slammed behind me with a dull thud...
- Hi, guys! - I said and froze in indecision on the threshold.
- Well, hello, - someone greeted me in response. - What article is it?
- 212.
- What is this?
- Theft using computer equipment...
- A hacker, or what?
- Not quite.
- Well, come in.
Only now could I finally make out the person I was talking to, a skinny guy in his early twenties, covered in tattoos. It was impossible to do so from the doorway because of the tobacco smoke hanging in clouds over their heads.
“Makar,” he introduced himself. “I look after this hut. What’s your name?
” “Sergey.”
“Namesake, then. Where are you from?
” “From Minsk, lived in Ukraine for the last year. Came back to my homeland, and here you go.
” “No wonder. If you want to go to jail, come to Belarus. If you want to go to jail quickly, come to Minsk. Have you heard of that saying?
I shook my head.
“Well, you’ll hear it more than once.” How long did they keep you in the “holding cell”?
“No, they brought me in yesterday, and today they ‘raised me up.’ The others have been sitting there since Friday.
” “Do you know what kind of cell this is?
” “No.”
“Oh, you,” Makar shook his head regretfully, “you should have looked.” On the other side of the "brakes" (that's what they call the cell door) there is a cell number written. They could have taken me to the roosters, and what would I have done then?
- I don't know, but I would have done something. Maybe I would have "exposed myself" or cut one of them.
At the "assembly" seasoned prisoners told me that sometimes the operatives deliberately take you to the cell with the "offended" ones if they want to break you, and if, God forbid, you end up in such a cell, you need to do everything to "break out" of there right away.
- And would you be able to? - the supervisor looked at me with interest. - Do you at least have a "washing machine"?
- With me, - I unclenched my fist and showed him the sharp narrow blade from a disposable Bic razor, which I had been holding in my mouth.
- Okay, take a rest from the road, on that bunk over there, - he pointed to the lower bunks in the middle of the cell. There's another guy sleeping there - his name is Igor, you'll take turns to rest, twelve hours. That's nothing, - Makar must have noticed the surprise on my face, - in other huts they sleep in three shifts. If it gets really tough, agree among yourselves who will rest when, everything is on understanding. The guys will explain the everyday life to you, if it's unclear, ask me. Okay, rest, brother, we'll talk later.
The guy I shared a bunk with was about forty, and the scars on his shaved head clearly reflected all the holidays he had celebrated - this one was when I celebrated the New Year, and this scar was from my birthday. A violent alcoholic, he was serving time on a change of regime - first he was given a "chemistry" for failure to pay alimony.
I put my bag (in prison terms - "keshar") - a checkered plastic duffel bag, like the kind Soviet "shuttle traders" took to Poland - in the corner of the hut, sat down on my bunk, caught my breath and looked around. The room was lit by a dim yellow bulb, enclosed in a thin metal grate. Four bunk beds, a toilet in the corner (called a “dolnyak” in prison), a cold water tap right above it, a small window with bars and “eyelashes”-blinds on the outside, and a narrow common table. The hut was too small (no more than 15 square meters) and too crowded - there were people lying on all the bunk beds. It smelled of long-unwashed bodies, unwashed socks and tobacco smoke. There was no ventilation in the cell, and all the inmates smoked without exception. It is not surprising that tuberculosis is the most common disease in Belarusian prisons.
The bunks were so close to each other that you could only squeeze between them sideways. Some of them were covered with thin blankets, others were open, but the laundry hanging on the ropes stretched over the bunks did not allow us to determine how many people were resting upstairs, but it was clear that there were many more prisoners in the cell than were allowed - as it turned out later, thirteen people.
I read somewhere that according to the MVD sanitary standards, each prisoner in a pretrial detention center is supposed to have at least 2 square meters of cell space - in the then Voldarka, the real norm was reduced to less than 1 square meter per person.
The world narrowed to the size of the cell, finally and irrevocably materializing in a space of 3 x 5 m. Somewhere there, behind the impenetrable walls of the central, the life of the big city was in full swing: countless herds of cars scurried along the avenues and streets, contracts were concluded in the offices of firms and banks, exams were taken at institutes.
Somewhere in the distance (far away) Mattafix started playing on the radio:
Big City Life,
Me try fi get by,
Pressure nah ease up no matter how hard I try.
Big City Life,
Here my heart have no base
And right now Babylon de pon me case…
I lay down on the bunk and closed my eyes…

Chapter 4
Flashbacks
We were vacationing on the Costa Dorada coast, in the town of Salou, not far from Tarragona. I remember Spain for its low prices, compared to Minsk, excellent weather, very salty Mediterranean Sea and a huge theme park Port Aventura - like Disneyland, only from Universal Studios.
One evening we were sitting in a local bar in Salou and thinking about where to spend that night.
— I’m sick of it all, I’m not getting any sleep, — I complained. — Nothing but drinking and discos. Maybe that’s enough? I should have gone with my women — at least we could have seen the country…
— Oh well, bro, we’ll have time to see more, — Dima patted me on the shoulder in a friendly way. — When are we going to have this much fun again? Then there’ll be family, kids…
— Okay, where this time? — I reluctantly gave in.
— Let’s go to FlashBack, — Ilya suggested. — We’ve never been there before.
— Call a taxi.
The FlashBack club greeted us with an impressive line of people wanting to get inside, gathered at the entrance to the one-story building closer to midnight, and pleased us with several dance floors and an abundance of music for every taste: retro was playing in one room, Eurotrance and house in another, and some other drum and bass in the third. Entrance — 10 euros, a T-shirt with the club’s logo as a gift.
— So, guys, fifty each to warm up?
— Fifty each, ha-ha.
— Double tequila, please, — Ilya didn’t think long about the order.
The sexy barmaid grabbed three tall, narrow juice glasses from the shelf, generously filled them with crushed ice, poured tequila and completed the simple ensemble with a cocktail straw.
— Uh-uh... excuse me, what is this? — I looked straight into the eyes of the young
creature.
— Your tequila, guys.
— Uh... where’s the salt and lime?
— That’s exactly how we drink tequila.
— Baby, I don’t know how you drink it, but we want to drink it the way we’re used to. Now repeat in small glasses and give us the salt and lime, — Dima asked.
— Okay, guys.
Tequila, more tequila, double tequila, tequila boom, double again and again…
— Guys, are you crazy? — the girl's eyes widened from contemplating our alcoholic bacchanalia.
I looked at her breasts, which by that point had grown two sizes in my eyes, and answered with a slurred voice:
— No, we're Russian…
— Hey, Seryoga, wake up. Fourteen hours without getting up, — someone was desperately waking me up. — It's already morning, soon the investigators and lawyers will start coming. What did you dream about? You were smiling in your sleep.
Today I dreamed about my mother,
I dreamed about the guys from the neighborhood,
I dreamed about Red Square and the corner of my house.
I slept so sweetly, I didn't expect a disappointment,
Why did I wake up — it would have been better if I had fallen into a coma.
I feel someone tugging at my leg:
Get up, everyone's already left, you'll be late, student,
I looked around, my head suddenly started spinning,
With this dream I completely forgot where I was and who I was.
I climbed down from the "palm tree", rubbed my eyes, climbed out onto the stretch,
The hut behind me remained empty.
I took one of the free places in the line,
They counted us, everything was correct - seventy-six.
Back in a big black-gray crowd,
my God... Another day, another fight.
In front of me is a strict hut,
And prisoners are being lined up,
That behind me are twenty years of life of some kind...
I dreamed... I dreamed of an iron sky... and cells instead of huts...
- Get up, now we'll drink chifir - you'll quickly get stoned.
I dreamed... FlashBack... how do you translate the word "flashback"?.. Ah, a reverse frame. An illustration interrupting the narrative to return to the past... Saprykin's words kept coming out of my head: no personal meetings or drinking bouts with clients and partners in dirty business... With partners, of course, it's okay (Saprykin himself is our partner), but with clients... Could it be that Ilyukha is right, and I was ratted out by one of those we met in Spain?.. It was hard to believe. Black Monarch... that one is out of the question right away. It's thanks to him that I've been making a hundred thousand a month in the last six months. Moreover, we are tightly connected - if I drown, he will drown too. And vice versa. Who else? Junkers, Sebi, xalexx - they are Romanians, and Romanians are generally shady, every single one of them... There was also eNdi - also a Romanian, he cashed me dumps with "pins", but we never met. By the way, why didn't we see each other?! - a terrible guess pierced my consciousness. Oh, right - he left Spain... And just on the day of our arrival. On the bus, to his Romania. To visit his family, he says, he hasn't seen him for a long time. A strange coincidence. All four know each other - some kind of mafia family. However, it is not surprising - it's like in the joke about Chapayev: I looked at the map - how much of that Romania is there... Probably, one of them turned me in.

Chapter 5
Horns and Hooves
Chifir turned out to be a very-very strong brewed black tea. We drank — according to an old prison tradition — from one mug, two sips at a time. Although each sip was difficult for me — pour 40-50 g of small-leaf black tea into 200 ml of water, then you’ll understand — it gave me such energy that after ten minutes even the hair on my arms was standing on end.
— Are you expecting anyone today? — Igor, with whom I shared a bunk, asked me.
— The lawyer promised to come, but I don’t know what time. What did you want?
— I’ll text you my wife’s phone number. Let her blurt it out and tell her to bring me a parcel.
— Yes, no problem.
An hour later, they dragged me out to the offices. Galina Arkadyevna smelled of some expensive but slightly old-fashioned French perfume, something very familiar, either Fiji or Poison.
— Hello, Sergey, — she was the first to greet me.
— Hello.
- So, how was your first night in prison?
- Not the first - I've already spent the night in the "sedimentation cell". But in a cell, yes, the first. Normal, at least I got some sleep, slept for fourteen hours.
- I gave your note to Katya, she also scribbled a couple of lines for you. She's doing well. Dima, too.
- Did Kaiser and Fidel leave?
- Yes, the same day they were all released.
— Well, thank God, — I sighed with relief: my friends had not been detained.
— Mom is very worried about you and asks why you don’t write to her.
— Well, I just can’t imagine what to write to her. It’s somehow embarrassing, or something.
After all, I ended up in jail. And on a criminal charge, at that.
— Drop it, — Galina Arkadyevna hastened to dissuade me, — no one is immune from poverty and prison. Billionaires are in jail — look, Khodorkovsky was recently “accepted”, and generals, and ministers. And not only here — all over the world. And not all of them are in jail for political crimes.
— Okay, tell her that I’ll write in a few days.
— Well done. Where did we stop last time?
— On eliminating your illiteracy in the area of using bank plastic cards.
— Exactly. You told me about the structure of bank plastic cards, about dumps and that white "plastic" could be cashed through acquaintances who owned stores, casinos, etc. How else do you steal money from credit cards?
- Shura Balaganov was very surprised when Ostap bought an inkwell for the "Horns and Hooves" office: "Ostap Ibragimovich, weren't you ashamed to pay real money for this inkwell?!" Shura was right, so I always paid for licensed software, access to porn sites and various paid resources (Internet libraries, online games) only with other people's credit cards. Of course, you can also buy a camera or a laptop in an online store - this is called "clothes" carding, but this is also pampering.
For heavier players, a suitcase of white "plastic" with recorded dumps is made, an office a la "Horns and Hooves" is opened, an office is rented, goods are purchased - all sorts of computers, electronics, and we start trading - at cost or even at a loss. The prices in our store are low, word of this spreads quickly, the flow of customers increases. We open an account in the bank, conclude an agreement and install a POS-terminal. We start running customer cards through it, as well as our own freshly opened "credits" from different banks - we accustom the bank to a large volume of purchases using credit cards. At one fine moment, we run this entire suitcase of white "plastic" through it, the money falls into the account, we take the cash - and to the girls.
Of course, it's not that simple, first you need to carefully study the country where you are going to do this (it's not worth it in the countries of the former Soviet Union for many reasons), possible pitfalls, the security system of the bank that installed the POS terminal for your "United Bratva" office, the time it takes to credit your hard-earned money to the account (the faster, the better), think through escape routes, calculate the costs - much more. Of course, you can't open such an office for yourself.
- But all this has little to do with your accusation. You are accused of buying goods in Minsk stores using counterfeit cards...
— Okay, let's move on to something more complicated. Initially, there is pure CR-80 "plastic" and dumps. How to print and make a credit card one to one, so that you can safely go to any store in any country?
First, you need to buy ready-made "plastic" with "doves" or a "globe" or buy these holograms separately. Then you need to find a printing house or buy your own equipment that will allow you to print something beautiful on pure CR-80 "plastic" - and practice shows that it does not matter at all which bank is indicated there and whether it corresponds to a real bank. Printing, of course, is double-sided. We printed it with great difficulty. Now you need to make these impressed credit card number, name, etc. - you will have to buy an embosser (a device that squeezes symbols on cards) and a tipper (a device for applying a silver or gold coating to them). Expensive models of embossers have a built-in tipper. In addition to all this, you need to stick a strip of special paper on the back of the "credit", on which the cardholder's signature is placed.
- How much money will go on equipment ... - Galina Arkadyevna noted absentmindedly.
- True. One good embosser, Matika Z3, for example, costs about a "ten". Therefore, I never made "plastic" myself, but stupidly bought it from the right people. Low quality, suitable for shopping only within the CIS - from Boa Factory in Kiev, excellent VISA Electron - from Flint on realplastic.org and the best offset "plastic" - from Chinese comrades, fortunately the Internet erases borders. Dumps on completely finished blanks, of course, could be recorded yourself - not everyone trusted the "plastic" manufacturers with this almost intimate procedure.
Less than six months have passed, and you already have a suitcase of duplicate credit cards, the quality of which no one will find fault with. What are the options with the suitcase? You buy a ticket to Singapore, for example, or Pretoria, and shop there until your suitcase is empty. Or better yet, go to Italy, a kind of Mecca for counterfeit credit cards. In Milan, if a salesperson guesses that a purchase is being made with a counterfeit card, he won’t report it to the police, but on the contrary, he’ll ask that if there are more such credit cards, then the buyer shouldn’t be shy. The store knows that banks will always compensate them for their losses. Then you somehow find somewhere to put all this “iron” or silver and gold, sell it, give it away. You change countries. And again, with a different passport and different credit cards. We were shopping in Minsk, but in vain, of course, you can’t steal where you live.
Between purchases, dumps had to be checked periodically (in our language, “checked”), since the most unpleasant thing when shopping was “knocking out” codes 43 (stolen card — confiscate and call the authorization center) or 07 (confiscate the card and try to detain the fraudster) on the POS terminal screen. There were three ways to check dumps for operability (validity): if this happens in Europe, then there is nothing easier than putting a credit card into a pay phone that accepts credit cards. In Russia, these are Comstar payphones. You can go to a drugstore, a bakery, any small shop with minimal security and no video cameras and buy some small stuff. And if the card doesn’t work, you can always smile sweetly at the saleswoman and pay in cash. The third method involves instant authorization of a small amount ($0.5–2) through any online service or store. This is called a checking service (from the English check — “to check”) and is widely used to this day. The owners of “checkers” buy up hacked merchants (gateways for credit card payments) for online stores in huge quantities and charge an average of $1 for checking one dump.
Despite the fact that most retail outlets in the world are equipped with electronic POS terminals, Minsk is still full of imprinters — mechanical devices that print relief data from a card onto a paper check. Paper checks made with an imprinter are also called slips (from the English slip — “to slide”, “to roll”). They are documentary evidence of the transaction. For authorization, the cashier dictates the information from the slip to the operator of the processing center over the phone. Naturally, when paying through an imprinter, the presence of a dump on the magnetic strip of the credit card was not required, which, when I realized this, gave me unlimited scope for “work”. At that time, American dumps were still working perfectly well in Belarus and even in Russia, costing pennies, and the sums on them could be very impressive.
- Okay, Sergey, - the lawyer interrupted me, - we seem to have sorted out the shopping cards, now let's go over the cards with "pins". Saprykin claims that it was you who gave him 20 white cards, wrote the codes on each one with a marker and asked to cash them out at Minsk ATMs. Is that true?
- Yes and no.
- ?!.
- Saprykin himself has a snout in the cannon...
- Okay, the role of each will become clear as the investigation progresses. In the meantime, Saprykin is a witness. Against you.
- I heard that sometimes witnesses very quickly become defendants here...
- Well, you're not going to burden him, are you? In any case, you don't need a "group of persons" right now. So, where did you get the PIN codes for the cards?

Chapter 6
Roads
There was no TV in the cell. No board games either, with the exception of chess made from bread. In this cell, 144, mostly drug addicts, alimony defaulters, and those who couldn’t sit still while on “chemistry” (in the Soviet Union, this was called “construction projects for the national economy”) were sitting under investigation. The person watching the cell, Sergei Makarov, was an injection drug addict with considerable experience, despite his age of twenty-five, and he injected into his vein everything that was prohibited by law. Probably, if aspirin had been prohibited, Makar would have “shot up” with it too. From him I learned that if earlier Belarusian drug addicts most often used heroin, poppy straw (in season) and methadone, today the most common high has become the so-called bubki — opium poppy seeds, which normal people sprinkle on poppy seed buns.
— This fashion came to us from Russia, — Makar began one evening after drinking a mug of chifir. — Along with the technology of opium extraction. According to the law, all edible poppy seeds sold in retail chains must undergo heat treatment, which destroys the opium they contain. In reality, no more than 10% of all poppy seeds are processed.
— How much does heroin cost in Minsk now? — I interrupted Makar.
— Gerych and “vitamin” — 40 bucks per gram, methadone — 140.
— And “bubka”?
— Three years ago, in 2001, when no one in Minsk knew that edible poppy seeds could be injected, its price was about $3 per 1 kg. Today — from thirty and up. For some, this is big business.
— And what is “vitamin”? — I asked curiously.
— Amphetamine. A synthetic analogue of cocaine. "Speeds up" pretty well, but I don't like it - it's more for discos. Do you have accomplices? - Sergey Makarov switched to another topic.
- Yes, - I sighed, - unfortunately. One is under a written undertaking not to leave the country, the other is floating around here somewhere.
- Accomplices are bad, - Makar said thoughtfully. - The worst thing is when everyone starts pulling the blanket over themselves and burdening others. It only plays into the cops' hands. If you're going to do crime - no matter what - do it all alone. It's more reliable and safer alone. What kind of cell is he in?
- Who?
- Well, your accomplice.
- I don't know yet. If I see him somewhere in the corridor or offices, I'll ask.
- You can write a search engine, - Makarov advised me. - This "message" will go through all the cells of the central, maybe your buddy will be found.
I wrote the so-called search "message", carefully packed it in several layers of cellophane from a cigarette pack and melted it with a lighter - the "road" in our hut worked "wet", through the toilet. How is this "road" - prison mail, which you have probably heard of, arranged? First, you need to weave a "horse" - a homemade rope from previously unraveled knitted things. This is done by twisting: four or five thin threads are folded together and twisted between themselves, then folded in half and twisted again - the result is a thin and relatively strong rope. To one end of it, "hedgehogs" are attached - thorns made from matches, or "floats" - toilet paper sealed in cellophane. In the neighboring hut they do the same. Then the two "horses" are lowered into the far end and, with the help of a large amount of water, get into a sewer pipe, where they get tangled up with each other. That's it, the "road" is laid. After the operation, one of the "horses" is removed, and the "malyavas" and loads are chased on the other - mainly tea and cigarettes.
The search "malyava" passes through all the huts of the central in an average of two days. I sent it out twice, and in none of the huts through which it passed was my accomplice and once good friend Pasha Voropaev found.
- Makar, - I turned to the hut caretaker, - the search team returned empty-handed twice.
- It happens. Look at this "malyava" carefully: it has the numbers of all the cells it passed through. That means your buddy isn't in these cells. But this doesn't have all the cells in the prison marked on it, - he picked up my "malyava" - there are some cells that aren't working, where it's impossible to get to them for various reasons, and there are some really "red" cells, where businessmen, customs officers, cops and all sorts of scum sit - it's possible that your Voropayev is in one of these cells. This is our brotherly move here... In other cells, they work through the air. That's if the windows in the neighboring cells are not far from each other. One hut makes a "gun" - a hollow tube of thick paper, most often from magazine pages, and paste - homemade glue from chewed and passed through a sheet of black bread, and a shuttlecock - a cone-shaped dart made of paper, weighted with the same bread. A "control" is tied to the shuttlecock - a thin braided thread from a synthetic sock. The shuttlecock from this homemade air gun is fired towards the neighboring hut. And there they catch it with a "dock" - a homemade stick made from the same magazine pages and paste. They work together, then the "horse" is launched, and everything is as usual. "The road" is sacred, the circulatory system of any prison, without "roads" communication ceases, common issues are not resolved, you don't even know what's going on in the neighboring building - suddenly the cops or bitches are beating someone up, and a person's fate often depends on one "note" - you never know what testimony needs to be agreed upon with accomplices or some other serious issue needs to be resolved. A lot depends on testimony in your criminal case. Take, for example, giving a bribe. You slipped a "tenner" to a traffic cop, it somehow became known - that's it, you've given a bribe. But no, you can always say - if there is no tape or video recording, of course - that the traffic cops extorted money from you, said: "If you don't give us some money, we'll take your license." A bribe given under threat or extortion is not considered as such. Or another example: Article 214 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, "Theft." If you say that you wanted to dismantle the car for parts and sell it that way, that's not carjacking, but theft, and the punishment for it is often less than for "just taking it for a spin." Here you have to look at the cost of the car, so that it doesn't turn out to be a grand theft...

Chapter 7
Everyone Lies, or Thirteen Ways to Get PIN Codes
You have to think. For example, I am fed with ideas.
Ostap Bender
- Let's get back to our sheep, or rather, PIN codes, - my lawyer said during her next visit to me. - So, where did you get the "pins" for the cards?
"Pins"... At one time, Voa - the best carder in the world - said: "If suddenly once again you see somewhere that someone is selling dumps with "pins", - don't believe your eyes. Dumps with "pins" are like cash in your pocket. And for some reason no one has ever sold $100 for $20. If the $100 was printed in Washington, of course, and not in Grozny or Tehran." The first to refute this was Dark Elvis.
It all started when one morning my ICQ literally exploded from a bunch of practically identical messages from my colleagues, partners and just clients:
- Do you know who Dark Elvis is?
- Bro, is that you, by any chance, Dark Elvis?
- Please, tell me where to find Dark Elvis.
- Who is he anyway?! - I was indignant. - Why are you all so interested in him? How are you crazy...
- Who all?! - my Spanish partner eNdi answered first.
- This morning andycredit asked, then Mondeo, now you...
- Bro, are you sick by any chance? You usually find out about everything before us. Elvis sells dumps with "pins".
- Mmm, dumps with... "pins"?! It would be too good to be true.
Dark Elvis was like a UFO - a mysterious object that everyone has heard about, but no one can find. All that was known about him was that he had not been to prison, but why he had not been there was unknown. But everyone knew that Elvis had tens of thousands of dumps with "pins", someone had even seen the bin list, and, of course, everyone dreamed of being the first to find him.
- Auger, share Dark Elvis's contact, - I wrote at random in ICQ to my regular supplier of dumps.
- Are you kidding?! - he answered almost instantly.
- Does it look like a joke?
- Okay, let's forget it. I won't give you the contact, but you can work with him through me. What are you interested in?
- The same as everyone else - dumps with "pins".
- Well, let me send you a couple of them by email for testing. If okay, you'll pay $600 for them. Does it work?
- Yes.
A few hours later, Auger sent me two American debit dumps with PIN codes, one Maestro, the other VISA Classic.
- When will you work it out? - followed by the question.
— Instantly — the encoder is at hand.
Forty minutes later, I was already gutting one of Kiev's ATMs. VISA didn't work, but Maestro "gave" me $3,000 in two steps, despite the fact that the last $600 stubbornly refused to be withdrawn — a balance check before starting work showed that there were $3,600 on the card.
Probably, the daily limit is set at $3,000, — I guessed.
— Well, I'll try to "finish it off" after midnight, when the banks consider that a new day has begun. With this thought, I glanced at my watch and went to while away the remaining two hours before midnight at McDonalds on Khreshchatyk. Why McDonalds?
Kiev has the highest concentration of beautiful women in the world. You go down into the metro - a girl comes towards you... one, two, three... on the fourth your head is twisted back against your will, so much so that you can break your neck. And again - one, two, three, four. And in McDonalds on Khreshchatyk there are even more beautiful Ukrainian girls than in the metro. Kiev is a bachelor's paradise. The average life expectancy of men there is only fifty-six years, and for every twenty-year-old man there are four women of the same age.
After 24:00, my Maestro no longer worked. I tried several ATMs, but they all showed DECLINE (rejection). However, getting three "green" rubles, having spent only six hundred, was also very good.
- Well, how was the result? - my "ICQ" window flashed with a message from Auger when I got home and went to the computer.
- Normal. Classic - not working. Maestro - okay.
— Waiting for 300 wmz. You know the wallet.
— Here you go, — I opened my Webmoney Keeper and, without delay, transferred 300 bucks to Auger.
— Yeah, got it. Thanks. Do you still need Elvis's contact?
— Well, it doesn't really matter to me who to work with — if you don't want to "burn" Elvis, then let's work with you.
— Okay, — agreed Auger. — Here are the terms.
And here he disappointed me a little: one European dump with a "pin" was offered for $2 thousand, non-working ones were not exchanged (unlike the first test batch), the minimum batch was ten dumps. If you want - take it, if you don't want - don't take it.
I took it once - for $20 thousand. And everything would have been fine, but the lack of replacements reduced the profitability of this work to zero. I never played this lottery again.
And yet I think that Auger himself played the role of the mythical Dark Elvis...
- I don't get it, which Auger? - Galina Arkadyevna did not have access to my memories.
- Well, Auger is my dump supplier, who also sold me dumps with PIN codes.
- Ah-ah-ah. And how are you sure that Elvis and Auger are the same person?
- When I just started working with Auger, he let it slip that his partner Aizek[797] was just working on reversing...
- ?..
- Deciphering the "pins" from their dump database. And the impossibility of establishing direct contact with Elvis strengthened my guess. Most likely, Auger - a high-class cybercriminal with many years of experience - had several online names that even his partners in the illegal business do not associate with each other, but consider them to belong to different people.
- He's not in jail? — the lawyer asked for some reason.
— No, no, such people don’t sit. When I talked to Auger last time, he was going to buy a comfortable chair at Gazprom — he and Isaac had already earned a couple of million dollars — and give up carding forever. If a bird doesn’t sit on a nest, but rises higher and higher, it eventually ends up in a bird catcher’s net. Those who don’t feel when to stop break the laws of nature…
— How did Isaac decipher the “pins”? — Galina Arkadyevna interrupted my philosophical reasoning.
— The main requirement of payment systems for storing and transmitting a PIN code: the PIN value must always be encrypted, starting from its entry on the ATM or POS terminal keyboard and ending with verification in the “holy of holies” of any payment system — the secure hardware encryption module (HSM module) of the issuing bank. This module stores the PIN code generation key, and penetrating it will entail compromising all PINs ever generated using this key. Therefore, access to HSM devices is strictly limited both physically (hack-resistant modules are used) and via the Network.
- What did Isaac do?
- At different stages of processing, PIN codes go through many encryption/decryption stages, and not all HSMs through which the "pins" pass are located in the issuing bank's network protected from external intrusions. But they all support the outdated Standard Financial API interface, which is more than thirty years old. Aizek hacked the HSM on some intermediate host (network node) through a vulnerability in this interface. Then it's simple - a sniffer is installed on the hacked HSM module - a program that intercepts PIN codes in clear text or encrypted, but available for decoding. It sometimes takes several years to carry out such hacks.
— Why don’t HSM device manufacturers close these holes? — the lawyer asked a logical question.
— Well, they claim that all HSM modules are supplied to customers with standard settings that prevent such attacks, but their installation and configuration may not always be done by responsible or honest people, so the system is really vulnerable. It happens that there is no need to break anything — due to an oversight by the developers, programs that are used at points of sale to process payments from plastic cards save not only dumps, but also PIN codes. Fujitsu Transaction Solutions recently distinguished itself in this way.
— It turns out that bankers are being disingenuous when they claim that it is impossible to hack PIN codes…
— Everyone lies.
— And the “pins” that were found at Saprykin’s, — Galina Arkadyevna moved on to a more substantive conversation, — where did they come from?
— In early 2004, I met Black Monarch, one of the moderators of carder.org, the world’s first forum for carders. He sold American dumps with a “pin,” but only for “his own people,” since he couldn’t make many of them — only about five hundred a month.
— Wow! How did you cash out such quantities?
— We gave them to drops (cashiers) in different countries, left them 15–30%, and they sent our share via Western Union. All of them, with the exception of the local cashers, whom I personally controlled, deceived us and hid huge sums. It’s usually impossible to check how much was withdrawn from your dump.
— You said that Black Monarch “made” dumps with “pins.” How did he do them? — the lawyer perked up.
— In short, the scheme is as follows: we take a dump with the original first track — it contains the real name of the cardholder. We go to www.accurint.com, enter the victim's full name, find their SSN (Social Security Number, which all US citizens aged one year and over are required to have), date of birth, address and phone number - the more data we collect about the victim, the better. It is clear that if the holder's name is John Smith, we will get tired of guessing which of the two thousand John Smiths that accurint will give us in the search results is ours, so we should initially choose a dump with a surname that is rare for America. Then we go to the website of the bank that issued the card, "enroll" it (from the English enroll - "register") - that is, open online access to the card - and change the PIN code in a special way. True, it was not possible to change it on all cards, then we sold such dumps with already open online access to the card, and therefore a known balance - for 15% of the amount on the card. The profitability of my work with Black Monarch exceeded 300%.
When I had absolutely nothing to do, I called the "suckers" via Skype and, under a plausible pretext, tricked them into giving me "pins". This can also be done automatically: a robot program will call the victim, read a pre-recorded text warning about suspicious transactions with his account, and instruct the client to provide his credit card number, its expiration date and PIN code.
- What to do if you don't have access to an office like accurint? Where to look for SNN and other personal data of the card owner?
- There are plenty of people on carder forums who have put the search for personal data of Americans on stream. The whole pleasure costs $3-5. Why Americans? The fact is that detailed databases with complete information about citizens, including information about marriages and divorces, convictions, place of work, movable and immovable property, registered weapons, credit history, etc., are only available in the States. There is no single database for the European Union, only for individual countries. In addition, there are 300 million potential victims in America, while in Belgium, for example, there are only ten. Is there a difference?
- How else can you find out the PIN code?
— Phishing has gained serious momentum in the last year.
— ?..
— A distorted English word “fishing”. Users are sent messages with links to websites that are the spitting image of real banks, payment systems, social networks, etc., where attackers extract valuable personal data from gullible users — logins and passwords, credit card numbers, PIN codes, access to various paid websites, etc. In essence, phishing is a classic scam, the art of posing as someone you are not. It is based on users’ ignorance of basic things — in particular, the fact that banks and various services never send out emails asking for their account information. Phishing is especially common in the United States, where the population is highly law-abiding — if a bank sends a request, it must be responded to.
— Why do phishers steal access to social network accounts?
— To lure in new suckers, of course. The probability that a social network member will click on a link sent on behalf of a friend is about ten times higher than if the link had come to him by e-mail.
To protect against phishing, Internet browser manufacturers are already building anti-phishing protection into them, but phishing checking increases page loading time, and many users simply turn it off. Inattention and naivety are still the main cause of any problems. There is a known case when someone “lost” flash drives in London in the parking lots near company offices in the morning. The employees who found them, without thinking twice, stuck the devices into their work computers — apparently, they wanted to see what was written on them. That’s how, without much effort, a “Trojan” penetrated many corporate networks.
— Well, what do “pins” have to do with phishing? — my lawyer was perplexed.
— Many phishers have accumulated simply gigantic arrays of cards and PIN codes. Note, cards — but not dumps. But we, the carders, had dumps, and some of the databases contained millions of tracks. I had a logical idea to compare the databases of cards with the databases of dumps. The comparison was done, of course, by the card number.
- Did it work?
- Of course. The percentage of matches did not exceed 0.3%, but considering that both the phishers and the carders had millions of cards on hand, this became an excellent source of income for me.
There is also another topic of obtaining "pins", but it is already starting to "die". I heard about it from the Americans back in the fall of 2003. The trick was to generate a dump with only the credit card number, its expiration date and PIN code. Phishers came to the rescue again here - they had plenty of this stuff. The hardest part was writing a working dump.
Any dump — and for an ATM only the second track is enough — contains the card number, expiration date, and a certain three-digit security code. In the VISA system it is called CVV (Card Verification Value), and in Mastercard — CVC (Card Validation Code). Let's take, for example, a Fleet Bank credit dump: 4 30550 00923 27108 = 1102 10100 00529, CVV in this case is 529.
Or MBNA Bank, beloved by many: 4 26429 43183 44118 = 12011 01000 00445 00000, here CVV is 445.
By the way, this security code was introduced in the early 1990s after a very interesting story.
In 1990, Winchester Crown Court in England convicted two criminals who used a simple but effective scheme. They queued at ATMs, spied on customers' PINs, picked up receipts left by customers after completing a transaction, and copied the card numbers from them onto plastic blanks with a magnetic strip. Such people were called thrashers. This trick worked because banks printed the customer's credit card number in full on the receipt (now most of it is hidden by asterisks), and they only stopped doing this in 1993, after journalists shamed these banks on television and in the media, raising a fuss about such blatant cases of negligence. At the same time, payment systems came up with CVV/CVC codes - to completely eliminate the possibility that an intruder would create a working dump if he spied on the customer's card number.
It would seem that such a fraudulent scheme has now been reliably blocked. But no — despite the existing control capabilities, there are still plenty of banks that neglect it. American banks are mostly guilty of this, but they can only be identified empirically — no carder will share such information. American banks have lost billions of dollars due to disabled CVV checking. Gartner calculated that in 2004 alone, American financial institutions lost about $2.75 billion due to this scam. And that’s just in one year! In 2004, about half of American banks did not check CVV for banking transactions, as well as transactions using debit cards that require mandatory PIN entry. Citibank, the largest American financial institution, suffered the most. PINs have become the holy grail for carders.
— But all these methods are too complicated for the average person…
— There is a simpleton for every wise man — despite numerous warnings, many cardholders write down PIN codes directly on their cards. In case of loss or theft, the thief will have both the card and the PIN. I can understand the Americans — they have an average of seven cards per capita, but ours… If you write down the PIN on the card, do it in such a way that no one will understand that it is it — write it down as a phone number, for example, where the first or last digits of the number will be the PIN code. Oh, and one more thing: the bank’s customer service number is written on the back of the card. Copy it somewhere in your mobile phone, because if the card is stolen, you will start rushing around in confusion looking for the right phone number, and this may be enough time for the fraudster to steal your money.
And finally: according to the rules of payment systems, card transactions that were made with the entry of the PIN code cannot be contested. When you receive a card, you sign a document stating that you have received an envelope with a PIN code. It says that the client is fully responsible for the safety of this number. And if the client has "missed" this number, that's his problem. The bank has every right to refuse to consider a complaint about theft of money and will be absolutely right. Therefore, do not tell anyone your PIN code, just as do not give the card into the wrong hands.
The following methods of obtaining PIN codes involve certain physical actions with an ATM. For the first scam, you need steady hands and superglue. You glue the "Enter", "Clear", "Cancel" keys on the ATM and set up an ambush. The victim comes, puts the card in the slot of the ATM, enters the PIN code, after which he finds out that the necessary keys do not work, and leaves - for example, to a bank branch for help. Here, the scammers jump out of ambush and withdraw money from the card using the touchscreen (for some reason, cardholders forget that all control functions are duplicated on the ATM screen).
There are also fake payment terminals, "POS" and even ATMs that emulate real ones, but are programmed only to collect dumps and PIN codes. Attacks of this type were first described in the USA back in 1988. Fraudsters built a machine that accepted any card and gave out a pack of cigarettes. This invention was placed in a store, and PIN codes and dumps were transmitted via a modem. The trick spread throughout the world.
Another source of problems for banks are test transactions. One type of ATM used a 14-digit key sequence to test the issuance of ten bills. In addition, the manual for setting up any model of ATM can be found on the Internet. It explains in detail how to put the ATM into diagnostic mode and reprogram it at your discretion - for example, to convince the machine that it is filled with one-dollar bills instead of "twenties" and get not $ 20, but $ 400. Of course, entering such a mode requires knowledge of a special code, but most ATMs use default passwords, which are specified in the manual.
In essence, any ATM or POS terminal is the same com-POS terminal-terminal is the same com- this is the same computer. And if the "POSes" work on their own "operating systems" such as Unicapt or Telium, then ATMs work under Windows, which means they can be successfully infected with a virus. True, most ATM networks are not connected to the Internet, and the only way to infect an ATM is to remove the cover and connect a laptop with pre-configured software to a special connector. Just recently, a group of Ukrainian carders developed a virus that, after installing it, allows you to withdraw all the money in the ATM using a special access card. In addition, the virus allows you to enter a certain code on the ATM keyboard and get a printout of all dumps and PIN codes that have passed through the infected device.
- Aren't ATMs equipped with video cameras that will record suspicious manipulations with opening the ATM cover, etc.? - Galina Arkadyevna asked a reasonable question.
- Every second Belarusian ATM does not have video cameras. That's what I'm saying - a country of fearless idiots ...
There is another way to get PIN codes, such as trapping (from the English trap - "trap"). You go to the ATM, insert your card, enter your PIN and… nothing. Then a stranger comes up to you and asks what’s wrong, is the ATM not working or something? You try to explain and enter your PIN in front of him. Naturally, nothing happens again. You can’t withdraw money, and you can’t get your card out either — it’s stuck. Angry, you go to the bank to swear. Meanwhile, the stranger quickly pulls a piece of thin film that was inside the card slot and prevented the information from being read, and pulls it out along with your card — and he’s already seen your PIN. To avoid this, follow these simple rules: don’t let anyone approach the ATM while you’re using it, and don’t listen to anyone’s advice. Solve problems with your card without leaving the ATM; if anything happens, call your bank’s customer service or the bank that installed the ATM. When entering the IN code, cover the keyboard with your free hand. True, all these precautions will not help if we are dealing with skimming.
— ?..
— Skimming (from the English skim — “to skim”) is one of the most hated types of carding by bankers all over the world. A skimmer is an inconspicuous device, only a few millimeters thick, that is inserted into the card slot and looks like a regular card reader, so it is extremely difficult for an inexperienced person to notice it. The victim inserts the card into the ATM receiver, unaware that there is a well-disguised skimmer installed in front of it, reading the card dump and saving it to the built-in flash memory. There are also more complex models of skimmers with a built-in GPRS modem, sending data via SMS or even to the carder by e-mail. The cost of such devices on the market starts at $8 thousand.
— Wait, what about the PIN code? The skimmer only copies the dump...
— Removing the PIN code in this case is also an art. They use disguised video cameras or even dummy keyboards placed over the real one. “Do not install the skimmer in the morning, as passers-by are more vigilant at this time. Do not choose an ATM that handles more than 250 customers a day. Avoid cities with a population of less than 15,000 residents - locals know very well what their ATMs look like and may notice your skimmer,” read the instructions attached to the skimmers sold on one of the carder sites.
- Carders, phishers, skimmers ... Is everything really that bad?
- Actually, no. It’s just that when making any transaction with a plastic card, be it withdrawing cash from an ATM or buying in an online store, it’s worth checking all the surroundings a hundred times before showing your card details. For computer payments, it would be a good idea to turn on anti-phishing and promptly update anti-virus programs. When paying with a card in a store (restaurant, hotel, etc.), do not let the card disappear from sight. For example, a waiter can easily say that the terminal is located there and he needs to go away to swipe your card. In this case, go with him. After paying in a dubious place, carefully examine the receipt - are there any extra amounts. Try not to pay with a card in high-risk countries - Turkey, Egypt, Thailand, Ukraine. This is especially true for credit cards, because in this case you lose the bank's money, and you will be in debt, and with interest.
It is better to use ATMs that are located inside the bank - there is a lower chance that they will have a skimmer installed. Develop a habit of carefully looking at the card slot - is there any foreign overlay there, and at the ATM keyboard. It's worth remembering that a healthy dose of paranoia can protect your money better than false modesty and genuine carelessness.
By the way, do you know what kind of hut Pasha Voropayev is sitting in? - I changed the subject.
— I don’t know, but be careful with him, — warned Galina Arkadyevna. — He and Batyuk have one lawyer between them, and that’s only possible if their position on your criminal case coincides. So, most likely, they are “loading” you, and look, they’ll even make you the organizer. They will sing in unison, and even if you are right three times over, you won’t be able to prove anything to our “justice”. You should have chosen your accomplices more carefully, or better yet, without them at all, if possible.
“Organizer”... “loading”... yeah, I got it. They probably gave me up. They were spotted shopping in Minsk - the cops got to them. “Where did you get the fake cards?” - “From Pavlovich”... Not an ounce of fun...

Chapter 8
Accomplices
You are as good as a sieve from a dog’s tail.
Ostap Bender
How did I manage to get myself into such a mess? After all, if I hadn’t gotten involved with Pasha and Styopa, there wouldn’t have been any exposure, much less a criminal case. That’s true: pick up a bee out of kindness, and you’ll find out what’s wrong with kindness. They asked for… a respected man called and asked to help “the right guys” with credit cards. They had been in Poland recently with Kostr, Roma Pogartsev, for his soldiers, shopping with their “plastic,” they knew their business. They had a falling out with Kostr, they wanted to continue working, but they didn’t have the cards. Why did they fall out?
So they went to Poland — Pogartsev, Batyuk, Voropaev, and Konovalov — to work with their “plastic.” Pogartsev — Electron from Flint — provided the cards. They bought laptops, watches, clothes, cell phones. They got burned on mobile phones - Konovalov went to IDEA - a Polish mobile operator, and Pogartsev, instead of checking the card, took amphetamine and only urged Konovalov - faster, faster. He was "accepted" - the guys stepped on the gas and away from there, so much so that they drove right into the courtyard of the police station. Fortunately, everything worked out. Upon arrival in Minsk, Batyuk and Voropaev realized that it is better to lose with a smart person than to find with a fool, and parted with Kostr without regret. Here they met me very conveniently.
In addition to the lack of credit cards, my new acquaintances did not have money so that I could order "plastic" for them. They only had a few good quality used Electron cards, a couple of new laptops bought during shopping in Poland, and the desire to continue working as drops - now mine.
I contacted Liratto, one of the owners of Boa Factory, a Kyiv factory that produces counterfeit credit cards and all sorts of documents, from diplomas to passports. When you go to boafactory.net, you immediately see tempting offers like: “Want a Russian passport in three days? No problem. Need a college degree? Easy. Certificates, testimonials, driving licenses, visas, gun permits and flashing lights? You’ve come to the right place, buddy.” Boa Factory offered to counterfeit almost any document with quality indistinguishable from the real thing. The company even put stamps on entry/exit from neutral countries so that the passport would not look new. The cost of services varied significantly depending on the complexity. For example, the price of a Russian passport was around $400, and for a real, albeit not entirely honestly obtained, Irish citizenship reached 25 thousand “evergreens”. The Boa factory also worked with real "plastic", selling both ready-made credit cards and equipment for their production.
- Igor, do you have encoders in stock? - I asked Liratto.
- Yes, no problem. True, only MSR 106 are left - they do not record all cards, only those with a Lo-Co (Low Coercivity) stripe. This is a brown "magnet", and for a black one - High-Co - you need the MSR 206 model. High-Co (High Coercivity, in simple terms, this is a higher level of magnetization) is considered more durable, it can be rewritten many more times.
- Nothing to do, I'll have to take the 106th. Only I don't have money...
- I don't get it...
- Literally. I have a laptop, a Toshiba Satellite, a new one - take it as collateral. We'll work on the "plastic" - we'll make a change for cash.
- Okay, come.
A few days later, Stepan and I were already in Kiev. Oh, Kiev left an indelible impression on me. After the quiet patriarchal Minsk, thirty years behind the times, the capital of Ukraine seemed like real Europe to us. Countless cafes with democratic prices, huge shopping centers, high-rises, exhibitions, a boiling nightlife - it seemed that freedom permeated everything around, from the air to the consciousness of the people living there.
For several days we drank the strongest Austrian rum in the company of young but very talented carders from the carder.org forum - Neo, Motherfucker and Lilu (who in reality turned out to be a nice girl Olya) and exchanged experiences. I told them about real "plastic", and the Kievites shared their developments in "clothes" carding. After three days of partying, during which Stepan and I visited almost half of Kyiv's drinking spots, I finally met Liratto, exchanged the laptop for an encoder, and with a sense of accomplishment, Stepan and I returned to Minsk.
And then it all started: we record the dump on a used record, work it out quickly, erase it, put another dump on top, and start over. Our MSR 106 never turned off for a minute. At that time, American dumps were still working perfectly in Belarus, which my suppliers had in abundance and which cost only $5–10. Thirty cases of vodka, a case of cognac, gold, a couple of cameras, Swiss watches, delicacies, cigars, perfume, phones, gas stations, boutiques, restaurants, and saunas were paid for with a “plastic card”. It’s very easy to feel rich when you have a “plastic card” with a bottomless VISA Infinite in your pocket. We were so excited that we hardly thought about safety - we loaded the boxes of vodka directly into a cash-in-transit minibus belonging to a banker Pasha knew, we "pounded" the same place for a long time, neglected the surveillance cameras (of course, I didn't show myself in front of any of them). The city became too small for us - there were no places left in Minsk where they accepted cards for payment and where we weren't known by sight, and in 2002 there were no more than thirty of them.
- Let's go "out of town" and work - here every dog knows us by now, - I suggested one morning, waking up after another successful shopping spree that ended with the obligatory drinking binge, sauna and women of easy virtue. - I have one place in mind, three thousand kilometers from here - I worked there very successfully last summer.
The following weekend we were already loading our simple belongings into the train compartment: a laptop, an encoder, a dozen cards from Liratto and Flint, personal belongings and several huge bags of vodka and groceries, bought again with plastic.
Oleg, my old Internet friend, whom we were going to visit, met us at the station and put us up in his two-room bachelor apartment.
The money we had brought with us ran out in two days.
- Oleg, do you have a car? - I asked our hospitable host.
- No, why?
- It's still 120 kilometers to the place I've planned for work.
- Oh, well, my friend has one. Just pay for the gas.
- Let him take it on credit, I don't have any money at all, - Stepan began to think and get into the work rhythm. - We'll earn some money and then we'll pay, no problem.
I called my old friend, with whom I worked in these parts last summer:
- Tolik, hi, it's me. Get yourself in order, there's work. Tomorrow I'll be in your city. Do you have decent clothes? What kind of suit...
- No suit, but I'll find something suitable.
- Put on more expensive shoes - people immediately pay attention to shoes. I'll give you my watch. They meet you by your clothes - they see you off by your mind. Have you heard of that? Get a haircut, shave, well, basically everything like last time - so that you look presentable and resemble a visiting millionaire. Anyway, tomorrow at ten we'll be at your place. See you there, bro.
The next day we were in full combat gear: Stepan in a formal three-piece suit, Pasha in an Adidas Original tracksuit, ripped designer jeans and a cap, a sort of city slacker, and I were standing in the general meeting place and waiting for Tolya. He was running late.
- Are you sure he'll cope? - Stepan was worried. - Unpunctual is not good.
- Don't get so worked up, - I snapped, trying to suppress the gloomy mood. - These aren't roads in our usual sense, but mountain serpentines - maybe that's why he's late. The drop was prepared - it worked perfectly last time, a sort of a partying visiting Muscovite who's been drinking with some chicks in some unknown place for a week, and now doesn't know how to make amends to his wife, so he's buying up various gold necklaces, chains, bracelets and rings. And I played his son. It went off with a bang. Let's wait - ours won't go anywhere.
Tolyan showed up half an hour later. He looked apologetic and slightly rumpled.
- Gray, bro, - he started to hug me, - since you left, I've been waiting for you the whole time. You showed me such a topic and then ran away... I've already bought myself a computer, and installed high-speed Internet, I've scoured all the carder forums - but I still haven't found any ready-made cards. Let's get to work.
- What work, powder?! - Stepan immediately cut him off. - Have you seen yourself in the mirror? We asked you to tidy yourself up, and what about you? Did you at least have a hangover this morning? You're a lousy worker...
- Stepa is right: as Ostap Bender said, you're a tramp, Shura, a Gorky type! You need to be dressed up, washed up, given a major overhaul. Okay, Stepa, don't get on his nerves, - I changed my anger to mercy. — We’ll quickly get him in working order. A little stubble won’t even hurt. Come with me, “worker.”
I led him to our car, shoved a shoe brush and shoe polish into his hands, gave him a fresh Ferre shirt, a gold bracelet, took an expensive watch off my hand and put it on his wrist, and to complete the picture, sprayed Tolik’s unshaven neck with my favorite Hugo Boss Dark Blue.
— Well, now everything is in order, — I approvingly patted my comrade on the shoulder. — Have you found any places for shopping?
— Gray… here, damn it, the thing is… — Tolik hesitated. — After our trip with you last year, they took down the terminals all over the city and now they only accept cash. There are only three or four places left where “cardboard” still works — we haven’t been there yet.
— Why didn’t you tell me right away! — I almost cried from frustration.
— But you didn’t warn me that you were coming…
Indeed, we came three thousand kilometers away, and I didn’t even bother to call any of the locals and check the situation. And now there’s nothing but a draft in my pockets, and I need to urgently stir up something so that I’ll have something to return home with.
— Okay, Tolyan, what kind of establishments are there that still accept plastic?
— A mobile phone store, a couple of sports shops, a perfumery, — my friend immediately gave me a lesson learned by heart.
— Hmm, not much…
We returned to Stepan and Pasha, who were nervously smoking and waiting.
“Guys, here’s the thing…” I began hesitantly. “Basically, there are practically no places to work. They were there and then they were gone. So you, Stepan, now go to Mobile TeleSystems and get a bucket of cell phones, Pasha to the sports store, and I’ll go with Tolik, I’ll back him up if anything happens.” Does everyone understand?
The guys nodded in agreement. I dealt out the cards: Stepan got the best we had, VISA Classic from Boa Factory. Pashka got Electron from Flint, and Tolik and I got a bunch of cards. We agreed to meet by the car, or call each other on our cell phones if anything happened.
“So I go into the showroom,” Stepan was quickly telling me an hour later, “what’s what, I choose, try them out, ask about them, I pick out five phones, ask for a discount, after all, it’s small wholesale.” The manager agreed. I give her the card — the cashier twirled it in her hands for a long time, tried to pick up the signature strip with her fingernail, and then shoved it under some kind of ultraviolet lamp. She asked for documents — well, I had a “fake” Estonian driver’s license with me, of course, and cards in the same name — everything was fine here, I wasn’t worried. In short, guys, what hasn’t she done with this card. And all this before paying, can you imagine?! I almost shit myself when she shoved the cardboard under the lamp, I thought it was the end. I ask: “What’s the matter?” And instead of an answer she shoved the instructions under my nose — read, she said, and don’t blab. If you’re interested, of course. In short, here it is — I “accidentally” grabbed it with me, look.
The main signs of counterfeit VISA and EUROCARD/MASTERCARD cards, most often encountered in Russia today, and methods for detecting them.
Hologram (three-dimensional image). On counterfeit holograms, the image may shimmer with all the colors of the rainbow, but the VOLUME of the image is missing. The background of a genuine hologram is clean, the images are easy to distinguish and detailed. The background of a counterfeit hologram is dim, and the image is unclear. A counterfeit EURO hologram often peels off (bubbles) when pressing on the front surface and bending the card in the area of the hologram. The foil with the image of a counterfeit hologram can be lifted with a fingernail. A genuine hologram does not bubble when bending the card, does not thicken, and cannot be damaged when trying to remove it from the plastic with a fingernail.
Signature panel. A strip of white paper is glued instead of the signature panel. The edges of the panel are easily lifted. In some cases, the panel lacks or has an erased background in the form of a three-color Mastercard inscription (EURO cards), a blue or three-color Visa inscription (V?SA cards).
Lamination. The front side of the card (and sometimes the back side) may have a transparent adhesive film - laminate. The laminating film peels off at the edges of the card, and sometimes in the area of the fake hologram and embossing it does not adhere tightly to the plastic.
BIN of the issuing bank. The first four digits of the account (card) number, duplicated in paint (usually black), can be erased from the card. On a real card, the BIN cannot be erased.
Logo. The Visa logo is a different color from the standard and can be erased from the card.
Microprinting. The microprint around the Visa logo is almost illegible and can be easily erased from the card.
Stylized symbols. The V or MC symbols are crudely made and differ from the standard ones. Ultraviolet
symbols. Under ultraviolet light, the cards may not have the image of a flying dove for Visa or the letters MC for EURO. Some counterfeits have these symbols, but they are unclear and blurred, and the card itself glows, which should not be the case. Magnetic stripe. The magnetic stripe data does not match the embossing. The end of the card is dark, not white. “When I saw the eighth point,” Stepan continued, “everything inside me sank, I definitely lost a couple of years of my life. However, my fears were in vain - the “plastic” passed all the tests. I'll have to check at home later to see if there's a pigeon there or not, I just happen to have an ultraviolet flashlight lying around somewhere. Then the cashier relaxed a bit, she swiped the card through the POS, and we both wait. And the security guards at the door are waiting too. Code 05, Decline - refusal. I give another card - it says 01, Call to bank. The girl picks up the phone and starts calling the bank. I think - screw it, I won't be so lucky a second time. I take the card, ask her to pack the phones - like I'll go to the car for cash - and get out of there. What idiots. In Minsk, we used to swipe discount cards under the guise of VISA without any problems, but here everything is somehow strict... - Okay, Pasha, what do you have? - I turned to another accomplice. He said that in two sportswear stores where he had been, although there were POS terminals, they did not work. Tolik had the same picture. — Why didn’t two cards work at once? — Stepan was perplexed, asking either me or himself. — This has never happened in Minsk. Have you checked their validity? — he turned to me. — Yes, a minute before you went to MTS. — And what kind of dumps are on them? — America. — So, maybe we should try “Europe”? — Stepan showed unusual intelligence. — What if the American cards don’t work here at all… — Maybe we should try… — I answered a little irritated. — If we find one, of course — I wrote down American dumps on all the cards, they worked last year.












Last year… — I couldn’t believe I’d said and done such a thing… What an idiot! In the plastic world, everything can change in a day, and here it’s been almost a year… Of course, there were “non-American” dumps on my computer — not many, they cost $50–100, but I could have found five of them. True, the risk is huge — with the kind of vigilance that the saleswoman at the mobile phone store just demonstrated, they’ll definitely check the numbers on the receipt and the card, and that’s no good. We don’t have any new cards, and if we’re going to write anything down, it’ll only be on these. No, that’s not an option, it’s a total bust. What should we do? We don’t even have enough money for a return ticket.
— Tolik, what if we go to the shop where we bought our clothes last year? There’s a boutique there, the clothes are expensive — there’ll definitely be a terminal? — I asked, more to confirm the decision I’d already made.
— Well, go ahead, if you insist... Although... Oh, come on.
— Let's meet at the same place in an hour, — I told my Minsk guys, and we went our separate ways.
Some kind of bad feeling crept into my heart. To work in the same place that you recently "warmed up" for almost three thousand bucks... But there was no choice.
Tolya went ahead. I waited until he walked about three hundred meters away, and then followed him. We slowly walked one street, then another - there was the necessary shop. My friend went inside, and I watched unnoticed from the other side of the street, but I didn't stand still, but walked back and forth - two hundred meters one way, then the other. Five minutes, ten, twenty, half an hour finally - and my drop was still nowhere to be found. But suddenly a suspiciously large number of customers in civilian clothes appeared on the porch of the store. It was time to pack up. I returned to the car.
— Guys, we need to get out of here!
— ?! — they looked at me in bewilderment.
— It’s not too late. Tolik was “accepted”…
We got into the car and returned to Oleg. I immediately called Minsk, and they sent us $300 via Western Union. The train was leaving tomorrow. True, there was only enough money for two tickets — for Styopa and Pasha. I had to stay.
The guys left. The new money transfer from Minsk was supposed to arrive only in two days. Tolyan, who was in "captivity", knew Oleg's home phone number, and we understood that his arrival with the task force was only a matter of time. It was necessary to urgently change the apartment. Oleg asked his mistress to shelter me for a few days, and he himself began to wait for the cops to arrive. Before leaving, I asked Oleg to take my watch and bracelet from the failed drop. The visit of the "guests" went smoothly - they realized that they were late, and did not turn Oleg's apartment upside down. I waited until Monday, picked up the money at the "Western" branch, got into a taxi and went to the nearest airport, which was at least 300 kilometers away. We left for the city at dusk, plus it was raining heavily, and I was late for the flight, albeit only by five minutes. I had to spend the night in a rickety, windswept airport building and take a morning flight, although any delay would have meant serious trouble for me. However, luck was still on my side, and I got to Moscow without any problems. Now, years later, I see another mistake we made: we used our real documents to issue train and plane tickets, and if the cops had been a little more interested in catching us, it would have been easy for them to take Pasha and Stepan off the train and meet me upon arrival in the capital of our vast Motherland.

Chapter 9
Arrest
“Now tell me in detail about the circumstances of your arrest. We’ll try to appeal your arrest,” Galina Arkadyevna asked at our next meeting.
“Perhaps you could find out from the investigator when he’s planning to come see me,” I made a counter-offer.
“He’ll come, he has no choice. According to the law, the preliminary investigation period is two months. For a particularly serious article, like yours, they can extend it up to a year and a half. But of course, I’ll call him and find out. How long have you been in the pretrial detention center?
- Almost two weeks.
- I see. I think he’ll come next week. I’ll let you know in advance.
- What’s the investigator’s name, by the way?
- Makarevich… Now let’s talk about your arrest.
- Up to a year and a half… And that’s just the investigation… - the thought that I could spend so much time here frightened me and prevented me from concentrating.
- And take another year for the trial, - the lawyer “cheered” me. - That’s the maximum.
- A total of two and a half years… Not fun at all.
- Well, I think it’ll all be over sooner for us. In any case, I’ll do everything in my power.
- That makes me happy. And then, when I was arrested, they gave me some kind of duty lawyer, his last name was Kazak, I think, and she said to me almost from the doorway: “You have a good investigator, I’ve known him for a long time, I advise you to tell me everything as it happened,” I almost fell off my chair from such legal “help.”
“A sincere confession mitigates the sentence, but increases the term,” Galina Arkadyevna said ironically.
“Have you been working as a lawyer all this time?”
— No, I worked in the prosecutor's office for twenty years.
— How much do your services cost?
— One visit here is $100. A day in court is twice as much.
— All clear. What do you want to know about my arrest? And why do you need this at all — I'm already in jail?
— If the cops violated at least one of the rules of the Criminal Procedure Code during your arrest — the main book that regulates all investigative actions, from arrest to trial — then you can try to "break loose" under a written undertaking not to leave the country. The chances are slim, of course, but you need to write. At least because it will be easier to appeal other decisions in your case later, for example, extension of the terms of detention, etc.
— Okay, ask.
— Let's start from the beginning. Where were you detained, who, what did they say, where were you taken, what were you doing and where were you a few hours before the arrest? Which of your friends was present at the arrest? Every detail is important.
* *
— On Saturday — I remember it well — September 11, 2004, there was an important event for my brother and me. It was the day of the creation of DumpsMarket, my carder forum, and we certainly wanted to celebrate this fact with our closest partners and friends. Error32 and Fidel, the owners of another carder forum CarderPortal.org, came from Odessa, kaiser, my moderator from DumpsMarket, came from Yekaterinburg, Sasha Suvorov, aka JonnyHell, one of the strongest hackers in the world, came from Estonia, Ilya Saprykin and other guys were from Minsk. Some of them couldn’t come due to various circumstances. I rented a small private hotel, which was located just five minutes away from the Minsk ring road, on the territory of a former pioneer camp, and had everything necessary for a comfortable stay: Turkish and Russian baths, a swimming pool, six cozy rooms with huge beds and wild animal skins on the floor, a parking lot, Wi-Fi, billiards, paintball, a cozy fireplace room, a staff of cooks and a lake with huge carp and sturgeon, which you could catch and cook on the grill right there. A day's rent with full board, including food, beer and soft drinks, cost me only $800. This was generally a rule of good manners - when we periodically met with colleagues, the host paid for everyone's accommodation, drinks, sauna, girls and other entertainment. It is clear that the guests did not arrive empty-handed. Kaiser gave us two bottles of exclusive L'Or cognac from Martel in crystal Bacarrat decanters, the Odessans brought a rubber woman, which they solemnly handed to my brother and which we then half-stuck out of the tightly tinted, mirror-like shine window of my Mercedes and drove through half the city like that, causing smiles and laughter on the faces of Minsk residents tired from a long work week.
The fun lasted for four days, after which Johnny and Max (Error32) left, citing urgent matters... Although what "urgent matters" could there be? We don't meet that often. Damn, did one of them rat me out?!. Johnny couldn't - it would have been fraught with trouble for him too, but Error... we didn't have much business with him, we worked more with Fidel, Dima later became good friends with him. And Max... well, he came to see me in Kyiv a couple of times, and we met twice in Odessa, but we didn't do business together. Although, maybe he "lights up" with Fidel there, who knows. Such a modest guy... Fidel is a joker, the life of the party, absolutely without complexes and talkative in the Odessa way. He was always "picking up" Saprykin's girl. Or maybe she was hitting on him. But Error was mostly silent. And he left before everyone else. Was it a coincidence? And why was Maxim the first one I thought would rat us out?! Mom always told me that the first impression is the most accurate… Fidel stayed — you wouldn’t guess that about him. He stayed to celebrate his birthday with us. How old was he? Oh, I remembered, he was turning 20, a big milestone. Dima and I gave him a watch, a Longines Dolce Vita, we paid about $1,000 for it. Seryozha liked it right away. When was it? Exactly, September 16. A sauna, a fireplace, barbecue, everything home-style. And then everything was a blur.
I understood that they had come for me and only me — we hadn’t managed to commit anything criminal together in Belarus yet. My laptops and my brother’s… well, why did we take them with us? We were planning to hang out at the dacha for a couple of days, we thought we’d have to work — the “gnomes” were constantly calling our phones — they need dumps seven days a week, and we hadn’t been in touch for two days already. We've worked hard, damn... It's good that Katya figured out how to hide the money from the cops, 25 thousand bucks, otherwise it would have been a gift to them... I was going to take it to my grandfather - I had a metal suitcase, I put my savings in it and buried it in my grandfather's garden, so even none of my relatives knew. There were already about two hundred thousand in there. Grandfather... how will he survive my arrest?.. No, I can't tell him what happened to me, I should warn my mother. Fidel immediately disowned his computer, saying that he didn't know anything, the only things I had were my passport, phone, and return ticket. He did the right thing - who knows what else the cops would find there. I'll probably have to take the whole "bought" on myself, oh well, a laptop more, a laptop less. The main thing is that all the information on them is encrypted with the BestCrypt program. And it, as they say on all the carding forums, is indestructible. Let's check.
- Katya told me that you were taken at her dacha, - Galina Arkadyevna distracted me from my memories. - Have you ever wondered why there? Everyone else was released. You alone could have been taken at home, without any fuss or dust. But they had to involve the KGB, at least not Alpha...
KGB... But really, what does the Committee have to do with it?! After all, cases involving carders, as far as I know, are investigated by Department "K", and that's a police unit. Nevertheless, a KGB operative was also present at the arrest, I even looked at his ID. About thirty years old, short hair, wearing a black leather jacket - if I met him on the street, I would have thought that he was definitely some kind of "bro". Then he got behind the wheel of my Mercedes (and Mercedes have a "handbrake", not a "knob"), and for five minutes he couldn't move - he had to release the brake, then turn on the automatic transmission. Damn it, a redneck.
- As far as I managed to find out, you were "watched" near Minsk, when you were having fun in Ratomka with a large group, - the lawyer threw in a new puzzle.
Strange. Definitely strange. Why then did they let Johnnyhelle and Error leave peacefully?.. Or... did one of them rat me out? More riddles.
“Okay, Sergey, don’t rack your brains,” Nesterovich stopped me, seeing the puzzlement on my face. “They showed me a report on operational investigative measures from the KGB for the city of Minsk and the Minsk region. It said something like this: ‘On September 16, 2004, it became known that a group of young people, among whom was a suspect in committing an especially serious crime, Pavlovich S.A., left Minsk at about 6 p.m. in a dark-colored Mercedes-Benz E320, license plate 9999TE, and headed toward the state border with Ukraine. We ask you to take measures to detain Pavlovich S.A. on the Minsk-Gomel highway.’ The KGB sent this report to the Osipovichi District Department of Internal Affairs, realizing that you would have to pass through Osipovichi one way or another on your way to Ukraine. So the operatives didn’t know that you were heading to your dacha; they thought you were leaving for Ukraine. The Osipovichi cops, accordingly, should have detained you, but something didn't work out there.
- Well, the traffic cops stopped me on the highway. But they let me go. What time was the request for my detention sent? After 6:00 p.m. Even if it was by fax, that is, instantly. It takes me about 40 minutes to get to Osipovichi. It turns out that they simply didn't have time to brief these traffic cops on the situation.
- That's how it turns out, - the lawyer agreed.
— When they had already put handcuffs on me, I was still trying to play along, like, you must have confused me with someone else and all that. The cop standing next to me, his last name was Novik, just smiled slyly in response, like, you know perfectly well why we arrested you. And there was no mistake here. I still had dinner with the “bracelets” on my hands, drank a glass of vodka for the last time — who knows how many years later such an opportunity will arise again — they sat me down in the back seat of my car and took me to the Osipovichi District Department of Internal Affairs, a 10-minute drive away. There, our whole company was taken to different offices, the contents of our pockets were checked — I had about eight hundred dollars on me, the cops laid them out neatly on the table and took pictures of everything. And one idiot in glasses, I think Miklashevich, even tried to take a picture of me, but I covered my face. Then they pulled us out into the yard one by one — a strong wind and rain lashed our faces, I remember — and searched the cars. They took witnesses from the “monkey house,” some alcoholics. There was nothing in my car. There was nothing in Katya’s “Golf,” either. Saprykin’s BMW was the last to be searched. Who could have thought that he had a “plastic card” that had been used up two weeks ago in a Winston pack. White. And PIN codes on each one in marker. And he knew he had such a thing in his car. He couldn’t have dropped them off on the way to the police station, the fool. Well, that’s it, the end. Again, to different offices: what, how much, where from, whose? I kept quiet, of course. One cop — Novik — went out and was gone for ten minutes. He came back: “I’m asking again, what kind of cards are these?”
“This is the first time I’ve seen them.”
“You’re a fool, Polisdog. Saprykin is “burdening” you, and you are in denial. The judge will not appreciate this. Do you know what he says? That you gave them to him and asked him to withdraw cash from ATMs.”
“He’s lying! Show me his written testimony.”
“As you say,” Novik left the office again.
I was again left in the company of the “nerd” Miklashevich.
“Here, read it,” Novik, who appeared fifteen minutes later, threw a sheet of paper covered in large, sweeping handwriting on the table in front of me – a real jack-in-the-box.
I glanced at the text – everything was just as the cops said.
“No, this is all nonsense. I don’t know Saprykin’s handwriting, what if you wrote it yourself. And even if it was Ilya, it doesn’t matter, I still don’t know anything.”
Then they took fingerprints from everyone, including the girls, and took us to some assembly hall, gave us soap - printing ink, with which you "roll off your fingers", without it it is difficult to wash off. Although in the same neighboring Poland they have been using electronic fingerprint scanners for a long time.
They took us to Minsk. I dozed in the back seat of my, or maybe not my Mercedes. They didn’t remove the handcuffs. As it turned out, Saprykin and his girlfriend were released in Osipovichi. The rest were taken to the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs, sat down on chairs (by the way, it was already 8 am), and we sat for three hours under the supervision of some policeman, supposedly so that we wouldn’t talk to each other. But we still chatted, of course, the cop didn’t bother us too much. I whispered sweet nothings in Katya’s ear and gave her final instructions. Fidel tried to cheer everyone up as best he could. Dima withdrew into himself. Kaiser, for some reason, was the most worried of all. Everyone was very tired — none of us slept that night.
Investigator Makarevich showed up closer to 10 am. Again in different offices, "tea, cigarettes, answers to questions," as Shnur sings, "interrogations, more interrogations." True, they offered me not tea, but coffee. Fidel was interrogated in the next office, you could hear him shouting to the operatives: "Yes, Gray is a good guy, let him go." And at parting, when they were all already being taken away, he said to me: "Seryonya, hold on, we will get you out." Dima also held on well, waved his hand at me, as if everything would be fine. Of course it will be, the question now is, in how long.
- Well, for now you have "from six to fifteen," - Nesterovich broke her long silence.
Yes, I know what I'm facing! Why does she remind me of this all the time? Apparently, she is not lying that she worked in the prosecutor's office, she still has her prosecutorial habits.
- Then the IVS - temporary detention center, I spent the weekend there. What a hole. At 6 a.m. the radio turns on, the first national radio channel, and your day begins with listening to the Belarusian anthem. Of course, I have nothing against our anthem, but it would be okay if it played quietly, but it screams like crazy. Besides, it was the height of the grain harvesting campaign, and by the end of the first day I could already say to the nearest centner “how much money they had spent on each field”.
On Sunday they planted a “brood hen”, but of course I didn’t talk to him about the circumstances of my case. And he didn’t “punch through” himself, he listened more. Or “they” listened, this is a common practice in the temporary detention center, many houses are “wiretapped”, officially called “hearing control”.
“How do you know?” asked the lawyer.
“Well, some friends were there. ”
The next morning this Grisha says:
“They’re letting me go today, if you want, write a “malyava” and I’ll pass it on to whoever you tell, it’s not hard for me.”
Of course, what's so difficult about it: take the note, hide it securely and take it... to the investigator or operative, whoever sent him there. So I refused. I limited myself to giving him Katya's number and asking him to tell her to find me a normal lawyer and bring the package.
After lunch they took me to the prosecutor's office. They led me into the office in handcuffs.
"Do you plead guilty?" reluctantly tore his gaze away from his papers and asked a man who had grown plump for his age, wearing glasses and a blue uniform; it turned out he was the city's deputy prosecutor.
"No."
— Are you going to jail? — he looked at me in surprise.
— Do you have any options?
— There were no options, that’s how I ended up here, — I finished my story and looked at the lawyer, who was looking at me like a boa constrictor looks at a mouse.
— There’s nothing to really cling to, — she shook her head. — But we’ll still write, even if it’s formal. Paper will tolerate anything.
— How are we even going to build a defense?
— For now, you deny everything. We’ll read the text of the charges, see what facts the investigation has, and only then will you testify. That would be the right thing to do. Because our court hates it most of all when there are discrepancies in testimony: when you were arrested, you said one thing, during the preliminary investigation, and in the courtroom you came up with a third version. It’s immediately obvious that you’re lying and trying to wriggle out of it. A trial is a small show, and the more sympathy you evoke with your sincerity, the better. That’s why you need to tell the truth and only the truth in the courtroom. But not all of it. Yes, and one more thing: if in Europe, and even in Georgia, the testimony you give in the courtroom takes precedence, then in Belarus in 99% of cases the initial testimony is taken as a basis. So be careful not to get confused during interrogations, weigh every word.
The behavior tactics proposed by my defense attorney largely coincided with my vision of the criminal process, and it was unconditionally decided to accept it as a basis.
- Okay, dear, I have to go, - the lawyer hurried off somewhere. - I will still try to find out something about the progress of the investigation through my channels. Katya said that she agreed with someone about transferring you to another cell - she was very scared by the living conditions that you described to her. So, should I transfer you?
- Yes, - I answered without a shadow of a doubt.
- Well, bye, hold on.
We left the office at the same time. I was taken to a narrow "glass" where you usually wait to be lifted up to your cell, and Nesterovich - to leave the "institution".
"With such a lawyer, you have nothing to worry about," a prison warden in the rank of major, who saw Galina Arkadyevna and I leaving the same office, casually threw at me. "She's one of the top five..."
I still have not found out who this mythical top 5 Belarusian lawyers are.
The next day I was transferred to another cell.

Chapter 10
BadB
In Moscow, I met one of the "fathers" of the CarderPlanet forum, hiding on the Internet under the nickname BadB. We had been working with him for a long time, but through the Internet - sometimes he bought dumps from me, sometimes I from him.
Vladik — that was his name in “real life” — was very creative: he was constantly coming up with unconventional marketing moves and creating an informational buzz around himself in order to better sell credit cards, dumps and other forbidden goods. True, it often happened that he sold his customers outright crap — fortunately, his status as a don on CarderPlanet allowed him not to worry too much about his reputation. In fairness, it should be added that about seventy percent of traders of illegal virtual goods were guilty of selling the same product to multiple hands. Yes, it did not do us credit, but it brought in additional income. It rarely came to the point of outright selling the entire batch to a second or even third hand; usually, individual credit cards or dumps were sold, for some reason not used by the first buyer and remained “alive” even six months after the sale. It was convenient to use a product of this quality to plug the “holes” when particularly annoying clients, who, by the way, constantly deceived us with the number of cards that worked/failed, asked for a “replacement”.
BadB, as it turned out later, was the same age as me, although he looked about ten years older. Of average height, slightly plump, brown-eyed, brunette with two passports: Israeli and Ukrainian. A sharp, lively mind, a gifted tongue, girlishly long eyelashes and a clearly visible jagged scar that disfigured his upper lip.
“Vladislav,” he introduced himself as we sat and drank to our acquaintance in one of Moscow’s countless nightclubs. “I grew up in Ukraine, now I’m in Moscow. If I get tired of it here, I’ll move somewhere else, but for now I like it here. All the best things in the world immediately appear in Moscow. The night clubs are the trendiest, the shops are entire cities, booze, drugs - any, restaurants, cars - everything is the best. And the chicks here are the most beautiful...
- Well, that's understandable: adventure seekers from all over Russia come to Moscow. The most beautiful, smart and ambitious. Just like in Kiev - from all over Ukraine. Only everything is more soulful there, simpler. Even a prostitute in Kiev can easily cook you borscht in the morning, and if you need it, she can wash your socks. I'm speaking figuratively, of course. And in Moscow... Moscow is like a huge supermarket. I don't like this city with its eternal traffic jams. And everyone is too arrogant - I've been in the capital for less than a week, and I'm already a Muscovite, don't come near me, what are you talking about. And where did you get your Israeli passport? - I changed the subject.
- I coaxed it out at one time. Should I tell you how?
- Yeah, - I answered with interest, pouring Martell XO into our glasses.
- Then listen, - Vlad slowly took a large sip of cognac. - The issue of obtaining a second passport that allows free travel around the world, I think, worries almost everyone. An Israeli passport is perfect for this. Firstly, it gives the right to visa-free entry to almost all countries of the world, including Great Britain, but, admittedly, excluding the United States. Secondly, the holder of this passport can speak Russian absolutely fearlessly, and this will not arouse any suspicion. The list of advantages is very long.
How does an ordinary honest Soviet person who wants to leave our Motherland obtain Israeli citizenship? He applies to an organization called "Sokhnut" - this is an office created with money from the Israeli government that recruits people to resettle in Israel for permanent residence. Sokhnut offices are in all major cities of the CIS. For each immigrant they receive a bonus and are interested in recruiting as many of them as possible. After all, someone has to live in the desert and protect them from the Arabs! In short, the legal scheme looks like this: a person comes to the Jewish Agency, expresses a desire to leave, brings documents confirming his Jewish origin, they check them, he brings a clean passport with the OVIR stamp "Departure for permanent residence", they put an emigrant visa there and book a one-way plane ticket. Upon arrival in Israel, they take away his Russian passport and issue a temporary Israeli one. He receives a real passport only after a year of living in this country without leaving, and it is called "Darkon". The newly arrived emigrant also receives financial assistance, the amount of which varies and is called the "absorption basket". He receives part of the money at the airport in cash, part in checks, and the rest in approximately equal parts to an account over seven months (they can be withdrawn from an ATM anywhere). For a family of three, the basket comes to about $9-10k.
But we do not need easy ways. You do not want to live in the desert, you want money and a passport, right? Therefore, to begin with, you buy proof of your Jewish origin - this could be a birth certificate, certificates from a synagogue, etc. I don't think this is a big problem. The fact that "Russian" is written in your passport will not surprise anyone at the Jewish Agency - many Jews used to change their nationality. You go to the Jewish Agency, submit documents, fill out papers and wait for the check to be completed. If everything is done correctly, the check will not yield anything, and their checks are "left-field".
The check is passed. You get a clean passport and put a fake OVIR stamp in it about leaving for permanent residence. You give it to the Sokhnut to get an emigrant visa. While the paperwork is in progress, you report this passport as lost and make a new one. You get a tourist visa to Israel through a travel agency. You get an emigrant visa in the first passport and book a plane ticket. You get a tourist visa in the second passport. The first passport is stamped by Russian border guards for the date the ticket was booked. So, what do you have in your hands? A “lost” passport with fake OVIR stamps, a border guard stamp, and a real emigrant visa. And also a normal passport with a tourist visa and a one-way ticket.
You cross the border with a normal passport. You fly on a plane, drink vodka. Upon arrival, you take out your first passport, cross the Israeli border with it, and give it to the representatives of the State of Israel forever.
You receive a temporary Israeli passport and money. You drink and party. You buy a return ticket and fly away on your second passport. You spend seven months withdrawing money from an ATM. A year later, you return to Israel on a new tourist visa and receive a “Darkon” — a real passport. All this time, it will be considered that you did not leave the country, since no one will know that you left on a second passport.
What is on the liabilities side? The costs of a birth certificate and several fake stamps, the processing of two passports, and round-trip tickets. What is on the assets side? A legal passport that gives the right to visa-free entry around the world and $9-10k from the Israeli government for resourcefulness.
In those years, carders did not really hide their real data from each other and willingly shared their experiences. BadB's last name was Khorokhorin. Born and raised in Donetsk. Very emotional, impulsive and irresponsible. Unprincipled and very passionate, with an excellent nose for money - no serious carding topic in the world passed him by. Very sociable. A real gangster. The number one enemy of the United States. Dangerous because he is multifaceted: a bit of a hacker, a bit of a carder, a bit of a spammer, a bit of a counterfeiter and, of course, an adventurer of international scale. Vlad's favorite expression was: "If you're going to steal, steal a million, if you're going to sleep, sleep with the queen." He always lived in grand style and made the world revolve around him. If it happened that BadB had no money - and this happened often, considering that he spent everything on roulette, booze and whores - then within a couple of days at most Vlad managed to stir up some new topic and get a couple of thousand. "One of my friends," the speaker in Vlad's BMW sang in Andrey Makarevich's voice, "he was worth two, he wasn't used to waiting; every day was the last of days. He tested the strength of this world every moment - the world turned out to be stronger."
"But the song is about you," I said to Vlad.
He smiled.
BadB loved grand gestures: he would give $20 to the woman selling him a glass of water, and in night clubs we could easily “pick up” and take all the strippers with us. Like many carders, he was not tied to a specific place of residence, his adventurous nature required adventures every hour, and when I told him that in a week I might be flying to Kiev forever, Vladislav volunteered to fly with me. He also ordered two business class tickets.
I was packing the last of my things, BadB was already waiting in the taxi. I needed to check my Webmoney Keeper, where there were $9600 that I had to cash out and give immediately upon arrival in Kiev, and I wanted to make sure that everything was in order with the money. When I launched Keeper, I did not see any money there. Moreover, even my Z- and R-wallets were missing. I restarted the app several times, still hoping that it was a glitch, but my efforts were in vain. Vlad called me on my mobile every two minutes and screamed at the top of his lungs that we were late. I slammed the laptop shut, grabbed my duffel bag and ran out of the house. Needless to say, we missed our flight. We had to buy tickets for the next plane and fly economy class.
- Want to have a drink? - BadB suggested as soon as we gained altitude. - Sheridan, a liqueur - sweet and a little viscous, perfect for a flight.
- I don't really feel like it, - I declined. - There is a problem.
- What kind of problems could you, a handsome twenty-year-old guy, have?
- My WebMoney was stolen. And I need to give it back to you upon arrival.
- Damn! A lot?
- Quite a bit, almost 10k. That's why we were late. I opened the keeper - no wallets. I thought I was just dreaming, rubbed my eyes, restarted the program - the same picture. I must have been robbed.
- And how did you guess?! - Vlad mocked. - Webmoney Transfer claims that during the company's existence (since 1998) there has not been a single case of someone being able to hack the system directly, that is, through a vulnerability in its servers or software. In any case, this has not been reported.
- Therefore, only I myself could have given access to my money to an unknown hacker...
- Well done, a B for everyone - an A for you! When a hacker gets access to your wallet, he usually does not hesitate and does not look at five-digit numbers with affection, but immediately transfers the money to his keeper, after which he immediately cashes it out through the nearest electronic currency exchanger or some other method. All this takes a few minutes. It is almost impossible to get the money back. Every second counts now, so when you arrive in Kyiv, don’t go to the women, but run to the computer, got it?
Of course, I understood all this. When you "missed" such a sum, and not even your own money, you had to act without delay. In Kiev, the first thing I did was write a letter to the Webmoney arbitration, listed in detail the circumstances of the disappearance of my virtual money and asked them to take action as soon as possible. To Webmoney Transfer's credit, the answer was not long in coming: they told me that $300 had already been spent and could not be returned, but they blocked the remaining $9,300 in the wallets where they were transferred by an unknown intruder. In addition, the letter also provided the IP address of the thief, who turned out to be from Krasnodar. I must say that I was very lucky: the return of my $9,300 was now a matter of time, and the stolen $300 was a small price to pay for the security holes in my computer.
"Do you want to know how you were tricked?" BadB asked shortly after the answer from Webmoney, having dug up the securitylab.ru portal and other information security sites in two days.
— Spill it.
— Through a vulnerability in the RPC DCOM service, responsible for remote command execution. Have you seen any memory error messages lately?
I nodded.
— What about disabling the svchost.exe service and then rebooting the computer?
— Yes.
— Oh, you've become a victim too! RPC is a protocol that allows a program running on one computer to completely execute code on a remote computer. An attacker can execute code with SYSTEM privileges on the attacked machine, which means they can perform any action, including installing programs, deleting data, creating a new user with administrator privileges, etc., — Vlad read out information from the securitylab website. — All computers with Windows 2000/XP and open ports 135, 139, 445 or 593 are at risk. This is enough to take over the computers of most Internet users, — he summed up, rubbing his hands with satisfaction. — It is through this vulnerability that the notorious MS Blast worm spreads. So, Gray, you should have updated your antivirus in a timely manner and configured your firewall correctly — disable all unused TCP/IP ports.
— That’s what I did, — I said, perplexed. — My antivirus is from Kaspersky, and my firewall is Agnitum Outpost Firewall — the best products of their kind in the world. And I updated them almost daily…
— Wait a minute, when were you hacked?
— Three days ago, on July 13.
— Yeah, and information security specialists only discovered this vulnerability on July 16. That’s where the dog is buried! — my friend raised his index finger with an important air and looked like Archimedes who had discovered his “eureka”. — It’s called a zero-day vulnerability (0day, or zero-day) — a vulnerability for which code has already been written to exploit it, and the supplier of the program hacked by this code either doesn’t know about it yet or hasn’t had time to release fixes. According to IBM, about 140 thousand vulnerabilities are discovered annually, data on which is not published. In reality, their number is several times higher. This means that any machine connected to the Internet, despite the presence of an antivirus and a “firewall”, is completely defenseless, — BadB finished with an animated gleam in his eyes.
My money was returned two weeks later. I paid three hundred bucks to the FSB guys I knew, and very quickly they gave me the address, phone number and a list of people registered in the apartment from which the hacking took place. True, my call to the home phone yielded no results — some old woman, Lenin's age, picked up the phone, and the only other people registered in the apartment were my grandfather and some 12-year-old Nikita. Could it really be that this brat stole my ten thousand bucks?! It was hard to believe, but... when, two months after the incident, I checked my old mailboxes, which I had not used for six months, I came across an e-mail with the following content: "Sorry for using your WMZ. I understand that the amount is considerable and you will still start looking for me. The attached files contain the identifier, password and keys to the wallet where I transferred your money. Sorry again."
To say that I was surprised is to say nothing. It is clear that if I had read this letter earlier, the need to contact Webmoney arbitration with the subsequent blocking of my money would have disappeared by itself. But at that moment I did absolutely the right thing. It must have been this little boy who hacked my computer, because a more experienced hacker would have turned my "web money" into cache within an hour, and this one managed to burn his IP as well.
For a whole month, BadB and I partied in Kiev, visiting all the bars, strip clubs and discos in a row. I still remember our first visit to a dance club with a foreign-sounding name "111", which was located in the basement of the Kiev hotel "Lebed" - a kind of hybrid of the American bar "Wild Coyote" and a disco. Retro music, affordable prices, charming girls and a round bar counter with high chairs, on which fireworks were constantly scattered like sparks and half-naked young barmaids danced. And well after midnight, this round stand would start to slowly rotate, first in one direction, then in the other, so that it became unclear whether you were already that drunk, or whether the stand had actually been moving in the other direction a few minutes ago.
Power in the money, money in the power, —
напевал из колонки, установленной над баром, Coolio:
Minute after minute, hour after hour
Everybody’s running, but half of them ain’t looking,
It’s going on in the kitchen, but I don’t know what’s cooking.
They say I gotta learn, but nobody’s here to teach me.
If they can’t understand it, how can they reach me.
I guess they can’t, I guess they won’t I guess they front, that’s why I know my life is
out of luck, fool.
We’ve been spending most our lives, living in the gangsta’s paradise.
We’ve been spending most our lives, living in the gangsta’s paradise.
We keep spending most our lives, living in the gangsta’s paradise.
We keep spending most our lives, living in the gangsta’s paradise…
Через несколько дней BadB укатил в Донецк, и я остался один на один с огромным мегаполисом.
Глава 11
Чай, папиросы, ответы на вопросы…
Хата № 97 располагалась на четвертом этаже «старого» корпуса, и уже с порога понравилась мне тем, что была раза в три просторнее моего прежнего «люкса» — здесь было шестнадцать нар, огромное по тюремным меркам окно и не так уж много постояльцев — всего-то… двадцать пять человек.
Привет — откуда — статья — как зовут. Традиционная чашка чифиря за знакомство. Чем занимался на свободе? В каком районе жил? Что умеешь делать, может быть, рисовать или «стос» (игральные карты) клеить? На «дороге» стоял? Здесь у нас все чем-то занимаются…
Я огляделся. В глаза бросилось то, что в хате, после тесной 144-й напоминающей стадион, все действительно были заняты своим делом: одни крутили «коней», другие пропускали через плотную ткань хлеб для клейстера, кто-то стоял на «дороге» — эдакий местный филиал английских клубов по интересам — пришло мне на ум сравнение.
Смотрел за хатой Дима Батон — импозантный неглупый парень из Бреста. Тридцать семь лет от роду, профессиональный угонщик — на двоих с подельником больше тридцати эпизодов угонов «ауди» А8 и А6, а также BMW X5.
— Познакомься, хакер, — Батон показал на бородатого крепыша ростом не более 160 см, — это Славик Белоскурский, из Минска тоже, домушник, по 205-й, часть 4, заехал, это в особо крупном, — представил он одного из людей, с которыми делил хлеб и общался. — Тот, что спит в углу, — это Андрей Филонов, скоро в лагерь поедет, уже отмеряли семерку за разбой, хотя ты ведь понимаешь, какие в Беларуси разбои: дал по морде, забрал куртку или телефон — вот тебе уже и разбой.
— Я думал, разбой — это когда врываются в масках, «терпилу» в наручники, паяльник ему в задницу: «Где деньги?!» — перебил я.
— Все так, но не здесь. Вот телку в Москве прямо на проспекте Мира из «Порше» выкинули и уехали — это тоже разбой. А в Беларуси все больше на грабеж похоже. Мельчает криминальный мир…
I turned towards the man Baton was pointing to – Dima Batov in the worldly realm, the grand-nephew of the hero of the Great Patriotic War, Lieutenant General P. I. Batov. Filonov, who was already awake, sitting on the bunk and smoking a pipe, was a little over thirty, he had regular features, glasses and a goatee.
“He’s thirty-four,” Baton prompted. “Nineteen of them in prison.”
I looked at Dima in surprise – Filonov looked the least like a native prison inhabitant.
“Moderately smart, devilishly cunning,” Baton continued. “In another time and in another country, he could have headed the security service of some bank. That fair-haired intellectual,” Dima pointed towards a tall, thin man of about thirty-five, “is Boris Chunosov, ‘illegal entrepreneur,’ article – up to seven years. Importer of Nivea cosmetics to Belarus. According to official customs data, only $8,000 worth of Niveas were imported into the country per year. In reality, the group that included Borya imported $4.8 million worth of them. It was because of them that the head of the Investigative Committee, Zhora Zhuk, went on the run, and the head of the republic's Department for Economic Security and Combating Corruption, Klimenkov, received ten years. Zhuk and Klimenkov "protected" Borya's competitors, who asked them to shut down Boris and Co.'s firm. Chunosov and his accomplices are in jail - it would seem that the job was done, but it was not so - Borya's accomplice Ladis Karosas filed a "trail" with the KGB, many corruption schemes were uncovered, and the heads of customs officers and cops rolled. In short, the cops dug a hole for others - and they themselves fell into it. Besides them, - Baton gestured with his hand at Slavik, Phil and Borya, - there are a couple of normal guys in the cell - they are on the "road", even though they are "junkies". It touched upon us recently - the supervisor of the central wrote a "run" so that the drug addicts would be removed from general affairs, like, what trust can they have - they would sell their own mother for a fix. So it turned out that there is no one to write "notes" - the others are either asleep or "slowing down", and here we need active guys. The rest in the cell are "beer lions", you know, as CENTR sings:
He stole a piglet and an aluminum basin from the bathhouse from his neighbor,
Half the prison is sitting like that - Ivanov,
And all of them, of course, are innocent ...
Alcoholics ...
They stand outside the store with an outstretched hand. However, I am not interested in their criminal cases and future, I would like to sort out my own problems.
— I’ve seen people like that here before — they’re drinking together, one of them says, “Take my car and go get a lift.” He takes the keys, gets behind the wheel drunk and drives. The traffic cops stop him — pipe — take a breath — alcohol — investigation. They go to the car owner: “Did you give Petrov your car?” — “Well, I did.” — “Did you know he was intoxicated?” — “I knew, we were drinking together.” — “In that case, we’re taking away your license for three years — for ‘transferring the right to drive a vehicle to a person intoxicated’. Is that clear?” — “Ouch, Mr. Chief, no need.” — “Okay, then write a report of the theft.” And Vasya, of course, writes one — and sends yesterday’s drinking buddy to prison for two or three years.
— And take the drug addicts,” Dima decided to develop the topic. — He shoots up quietly and peacefully, doesn’t bother anyone. The cops find out about this, so they gain his trust under the guise of a fellow “junkie” and ask him to buy a couple of grams for them next time he buys for himself. Of course, he agrees — he can “cut” some for himself from someone else’s, so he buys and brings it — to the cops, as it turns out later. It’s called a test purchase. One or two such cases — and you’re already distributing, part 3 of article 328 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus — from eight years. It would be better to lock up the dealers, all those gypsies and gypsies who get kids hooked on drugs.
— No, the dealers pay. And then they sell the drugs that the cops themselves bring them.
— What kind of drug dealer is he? Just a sick person who agrees to help people like himself. And the cops are thus increasing the detection rate - how could they, they exposed a whole syndicate, a particularly serious article, stars on the shoulder straps and bonuses, - Baton lamented.
- And what did Slavik Beloskursky "get into" for? - I asked the supervisor.
- They accused him of apartment burglaries, including $600 thousand from the hut of some presidential aide for science. The investigators really wanted to solve this high-profile case, falsified evidence, but Slavik wrote complaints to various authorities every day and achieved something - he is no longer accused of burglary from the scientist's apartment. He even took on a couple of other people's episodes out of joy, if only it would all end sooner. In a few days he will go to court, he will get three years under the third part of his 205th - and to the camp. Consider that he has broken loose.
- Listen, Dima, why does he walk with difficulty, why can he barely move? - I pointed at Slavik.
- Yes, they beat him up when they arrested him, they really damaged his kidneys, "Almaz" took an entire counter-terrorist unit. He hasn't been able to recover for four months already. You can ask him yourself later, if he wants, he'll tell you.
The movement in the cell never stopped for a minute - everyone was cooking, frying, smoking, playing and arguing with each other. The road in three directions - to the neighboring cells and the floor below - TV, radio, round-the-clock communication and young people - it was much more fun here than in the shabby, overcrowded and oppressive cell one-four-four. From the first day I joined the company of Baton, Phil and Slavik, we "broke bread" together, smoked the same cigarettes for all of us, worried about each other and lived as one moderately friendly prison family. About once a month I drove $200-300 to the cell, and we had no need for anything.
I again sent out a search "malyava" in the hope of finding Pasha Voropaev and talking to him before the cops, but my hopes were not destined to come true.

Chapter 12
Interrogations, more interrogations...
Do you want to know what an interrogation is like?
The first interrogation is like your first sexual experience: you wait for it and you are certainly no less nervous. You never know for sure when it will happen - in the morning, during the day or even at night (it has happened). You just wait nervously: you put on a brave face in public, but in your soul you are very worried, because this one and only, very first visit of the investigator can slightly lift the curtain of uncertainty and obscurity over your future. It seems that you are constantly expecting them to come for you, and the duty pen and notebook are always at the ready, but that indifferent metallic voice behind the door: "Pavlovich, with the papers!" - still turns out to be unexpected. Your heart starts beating so much that it seems as if its pounding can be heard in the neighboring huts. But you put on a mask of indifference and go. Where are you going? Yes, towards my destiny, which is kind to some and not so kind to others.
I was interrogated for the first time on the evening of October 4. You will say: “What the hell! The man has been behind bars for eighteen days, and they only came to him now!” — and you will be absolutely right. Every day I myself was burning with the desire to quickly find out what I was accused of and what trials fate had in store for me. True, the investigators do not share this point of view and deliberately keep you in the dark — for a week, two, three. This is probably one of the elements of psychological pressure on defendants in particularly important criminal cases - a person taken into custody for the first time is in unusual, unfamiliar, rather harsh, sometimes inhuman conditions, and for someone these few weeks may be enough to break down and, at the first meeting with the investigator, write a confession, which, under favorable circumstances, may turn into a written undertaking not to leave and, albeit temporary and illusory, freedom.
I enter the office, squinting - the desk lamp is specially turned so as to shine directly into my eyes. A shabby wooden table with a tightly screwed ashtray, a couple of stools attached to the floor, a small window covered with an iron grate painted white, my lawyer Nesterovich and the lanky investigator Makarevich, who looks like a dry pine pole and whom I already know. Thin, freshly washed hair, a cheap suit from "Komintern" with trousers that are the wrong length... How old is he? - I try to guess, but the youthful blush on Makarevich's cheeks confuses all the cards, and he could equally well be twenty-five or about thirty.
- Well, hello, Sergei, - the investigator extended his hand to me. - How are you?
- With your prayers, - I responded to the handshake. - I'm listening.
- Here is the charge, read it. Don't worry too much - it's preliminary and will change more than once during the investigation. Well, have you read it?
- Yes.
- Do you plead guilty?
- Of course not.
- Okay, we'll write it down. Sign here and here. Can you tell me the passwords to your encrypted disks?
- If you guessed right, I won't tell.
- Well, as you wish. See you later, - Makarevich stood up and was about to leave.
- When can we expect you next time?
- According to the law, the preliminary investigation period is two months. That is, if we don't extend it. So any day now. Goodbye, Sergei Alexandrovich.
- Yeah, bye, - I muttered under my breath.
The ice has broken, gentlemen of the jury! Since they asked for passwords, it means they haven't opened my disks yet. That's good news. If the FBI couldn't decrypt a hard drive protected by BestCrypt using the brute force method (selecting a password using a dictionary) in a year, then our idiots certainly won't be able to.
I carefully read the text of the indictment: "preparation for theft using computer equipment" (part 2 of article 212 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus) - because of Saprykin and part 4 of article 212 for shopping in Minsk with Pasha and Stepan. I returned to the hut and had dinner. The boys did not pester me with questions.
- Slavik, tell me how you were identified, - I asked Beloskursky to drive away bad thoughts.
- Got busted making phone calls, - he began unexpectedly willingly. - "Listed" a couple of apartments, without any noise or dust - everything was quiet. I called the rest to study the approximate daily routine of the owners - I dialed from a pay phone, of course. I marked one apartment, went in, turned on the light - it didn't turn on. Damn it! I took a flashlight out of my pocket, turned it on, walked down the corridor - from somewhere in the darkness a blow, right in the jaw. I fell right away. Only shadows were jumping above me. And each one tried to hit me harder with a hobnailed boot, the bastards. I thought it was a ninja - it turned out to be "Almaz". How did I screw up? With the pay phone card. I had the biggest one, for seven hundred and fifty units. I called all the apartments - the last one, and the ones I had visited before, from this one card. Of course, I changed the pay phones, but I didn’t think about the card. But it also has a serial number — the minutes are written off somehow. The cops took the printout of calls from the huts I’d already visited — yeah, there are calls from pay phones, they figured out the serial number of my card, checked where else I call from it — and I especially often “pounded” at that last hut, well, and set up an ambush there. They beat up all the insides, — Slavik sighed heavily and grabbed his right side, — the kidneys especially. True, this helped me get the truth in the prosecutor’s office — they found a compromise with them so as not to put the cops in jail — for such and such a “trick,” and to drop some of the charges against me.
— At first, I also changed the numbers of my mobile phones every two weeks and reflashed the handsets, — I decided to share my experience. — Recently, by the way, handsets with a floating IMEI appeared. Press the button — and the identification number of your device is already different. Insert a new SIM card and call. True, all this is useless — you can change your number at least three times a day, but the phones you regularly call — mothers, girlfriends, wives — remain unchanged and the cops quickly figure out your new number. So much for new technologies: on the one hand, they make life much easier — remember how you lived without the Internet and a mobile phone, and on the other — they help the cops get on our trail.
The entire next week they did not bother us for interrogations, only the lawyer came, who dutifully brought me letters from relatives and friends, bypassing censorship. Borya took in his hands formatted and newsprint paper, paste, colored pens, a homemade stencil — now a talented person is truly talented in everything — and made a new deck of playing cards, after which he stubbornly taught us to play preference.
- So, Sergey, - Makarevich addressed me with an impenetrable face during his next visit, - are you still silent?
- Yeah, - I answered without thinking.
- And now? - with these words he opened his notebook, took out an expensive, probably a gift from someone, Parker fountain pen and deliberately slowly, like in cheap movies, wrote from memory the password to most of my encrypted disks.
— F…! — I couldn’t help but curse. — How did you open them? — It was a blow below the belt.
— Very simple. Your brother had the same password on one of his mailboxes in The Bat — an email client, and you know that getting a password from The Bat is as easy as pie…
This scenario turned out to be very unexpected and unpleasant for me — I was confident in the reliability of BestCrypt, and the cops got the password in such an easy way. The investigation got their hands on databases of new and sold dumps, a list of my clients, information about thousands of Western Union transfers, all my accounting, “scans” of fake passports that were on sale and, what’s most unpleasant, the complete history of ICQ messages, which was unsafe to keep, but necessary to resolve possible disputes with clients.
— Well, Dima! I wish I could strangle you with my own hands! — I cursed at my brother.
— Come on, — the investigator stopped my impulse. — You’re not the first, you’re not the last. During the work of our department, we have already picked up thousands of different passwords. According to statistics, the most common passwords in the world are 123456 and password. But this is not about you - carders, of course, have more complicated ones. Some, like Oleg Bunas, the owner of the electronic currency exchanger Webmoney.by, have a password length of up to fifty characters. However, one day he got tired of entering such a password manually and Bunas wrote it down in a text file on his desktop. Ironically, it was on that day that we came to him. The human factor...
- And I was stupid enough to set the same password for several cryptocontainers...
- You are not alone in this - 56% of Internet users from France have a single password for all sites. The same habit is typical for 45% of users from the Benelux countries, 35% of the British and 16% of German citizens. But you don’t use the same key for your house, car and garage, right? Passwords should not be written down on paper, they should not be saved in text or any other files, ideally all passwords should be stored only in your head. In addition, they should not be saved in various applications, ICQ, mail clients, when working in, mail clients, when working on the Internet - each time on the Internet - each time passwords should be re-entered. No one except you knows the ideal password, and you and your brother had one for both of you...
- Sometimes even women have one for both of us.
- Well, that's up to you. By the way, passwords should be changed every few months. Their complexity should depend on the importance of the data being protected. For important information, password symbols should be chosen from a random sequence, for less important information, it is acceptable to use meaningful password phrases.
- That's exactly what I did. Look what the password was on my cryptocontainers - *#%IHateTheP liCe%#*.
— “I hate the police,” Makarevich translated the meaning of my password into Russian. — Don’t make me laugh. And what passwords did you have on your other disks? *#%IHateTheP0liCe_icq%#* and *#%IHateTheP0liCe_stuff%#*. It took us only five hours to “bruteforce” the passwords to your other two disks. So the less logical sense and patterns in your passwords, the better. The ideal password shouldn’t be too long, so that one day you don’t write it down on a sticker and stick it to your monitor, but it shouldn’t be too short either. Fourteen to sixteen characters is quite enough. So, shall we continue playing “silent”?
— I’ll think about it.
— Think about it. I’ll come in a week, — Makarevich left with the proud look of a winner.

Chapter 13
CarderPlanet
“So, did your investigator mess up all our plans?” my lawyer was either asking or asserting the next time we saw each other. “As I understand it, all the evidence is there on your computers?”
I nodded affirmatively.
“Until today, we could have safely denied it – apart from the testimony of Voropaev, Batyuk and Saprykin, there was absolutely nothing against you, and we would have won the case. But now we need to think and act in a different direction,” Galina Arkadyevna summed up.
“Do you have any chances?” I was worried. “I don’t feel like spending ‘six to fifteen’ here at all.”
“I understand,” the lawyer sighed sympathetically. “Okay, don’t worry – it wasn’t for nothing that I worked in the city prosecutor’s office for twenty years. We’ll think of something,” she added meaningfully. “I’m surprised how you even became a cybercriminal.” Such a promising young man...
* *
Probably, in the life of every person there are certain turning points that turn the course of your life in a completely different direction. For me, such an event was my acquaintance with the CarderPlanet forum. No, of course, I had been doing it before - I was engaged in "clothes carding" and often visited the world's first forum for carders carder.org, but "Planet" changed literally everything...
I first learned about the CarderPlanet website somewhere in 2002. Now I don't remember how, but I remember very well what an impression it made. Probably, Ali Baba experienced the same feelings when he stumbled upon a cave filled to the brim with treasures. Each section contained a ton of information on how to get rich, as they say, without leaving your computer. Incomprehensible and already familiar terms, such as "dumps", "drops", "wires", "credits", inspired me to study this tricky science. The temptation was too great for a young man who could legally earn no more than $200 a month in his city. I remember how my friend and I discussed the horizons that had opened up and dreamed of millions…
CarderPlanet was a unique information resource where carders simply lived — it was not for nothing that it was called the “Planet”. It was a kind of carder brotherhood, where everyone helped each other and helped everyone. Imitating the members of mafia clans, the creators of the forum called themselves a “family”. This was the top of the pyramid. It included Script, the founder of the forum, RyDen, Boa, Pan Kohones, VVC3, Bigbuyer and BadB. All of them enjoyed universal trust and respect. Members of the “family” had the status of Don, Script — Godfather, — users with the status of capo di capi (boss of all bosses) were responsible for security and assistance to the family, Capo were trusted “members”, etc. Despite this pathos, big things were done on the “Planet” and serious issues were discussed. CarderPlanet forums sheltered not only carders of all stripes, but also hackers, spammers, virus writers and many other representatives of the computer underground. Most of them were real masters of their illegal business.
A lot of unique and useful information, verified people, services for selling various information ("cardboard", PayPal and Ebay accounts, bank accounts) and providing security (VPN, socks and proxies), for sending spam, for selling fake documents and plastic cards stably brought new people to the site. From time to time, people shared various goodies (six-digit ICQs, hosting or accounts on hacked FTP) for free. "Planet" gave carders everything they needed: information, tools, services - a kind of all inclusive for a carder. It is not surprising that for many of us it became a second home.
At that time I was studying at the journalism department and dating Katya, a cheerful, mischievous, sharp-tongued, smart and ambitious girl from a good family, whom I met at the department. Katerina loved strong language, dogs, Paris, blue cheese, Krasnaya Moskva perfume, adored porn and extreme sex - we did it at the Dinamo Minsk stadium, in fitting rooms, on the balcony of her house in the very center of Minsk, in a crowded train compartment on the top bunk... She always knew exactly what she wanted, wrote long, smart articles for me for the regional newspaper Zapady Lenina when I was doing my internship there, went hunting with me and forgave me even for the fact that I paid little attention to her.
The major I chose at the journalism department was called Public Relations and was generally interesting to me. Unfortunately, my mother's unsuccessful second marriage to an alcoholic, the constant scandals caused by his incessant drinking, my unwillingness and inability to live at home, and the catastrophic lack of money in the family did not contribute to my successful studies. I spent days on end in computer clubs. At first, they played Counter Strike, hostages, bombs, explosions, terrorists and counter-terrorists. Right there, right at the computers, we ate - mostly Rollton and Kirieshki, washed it all down with Baltika. I remember how I saw the third Heroes for the first time... and fell into unconsciousness for three days. I woke up from Katya's call: "Pavlovich, are you completely nuts?! "He completely forgot about me..." - I realized that the world I had lived in for the last three days was very different from the real one. And when the Internet was installed in the clubs, my studies went completely wrong - it was good if I attended lectures once or twice a week. Things weren't going smoothly with Katya either - I preferred to spend my free time on the CarderPlanet forum. What journalism and PR, when, by turning on your brain, you could earn a hundred or two hundred bucks a day without getting up from your computer! By the summer of 2002, karting had finally captured my imagination.
One day, when another academic session was barely passed, my friend Andre, with whom we had been messing around on "Planet" on small things, suggested that I spend the summer in Cyprus. "A great idea!" I thought. "Only finances are tight right now. Okay, I'll think of something." With these thoughts, I opened a file with credit cards hidden deep in the depths of my computer. Someone else's, of course.
The first thing I did was book plane tickets - I went to the website of the Polish airline LOT, booked and paid by card for two tickets on the Warsaw-Prague route, since for some reason there was no direct flight to Larnaca on the LOT website. Then I did the same on the Czech Airlines website, on the Prague-Larnaca route. When you book plane tickets online, you only get an electronic form confirming your reservation and payment, and paper tickets are issued at the departure airport after presenting this printout and your passport.
Warsaw greeted us with modern skyscrapers - this was my first trip behind the "iron curtain" - and a $40 fine for riding a tram without a ticket, since Andre - a damn cheapskate - decided to "save" on buying tickets.
We arrived at the airport. Ticket office. We handed over our passports and the printout from the website. The cashier says everything is okay, but she would like to see the credit card used to pay, or at least a fax scan of it.
- Damn! - Andre cursed. - We didn't foresee that. What are we going to do? - He looked at me.
- Sanya, we need to go to an Internet cafe, sit down at the computer and scan the card. The whole thing will take at least two hours.
— Madam, — he turned to the cashier. — We need to contact our friend, the card owner, so that he can fax a copy of the card. So we'll come for the tickets a little later, — he said, and we headed to the nearest Internet cafe.
— Sasha, — I turned toward the neighboring computer and touched my friend on the shoulder, — do you by any chance have Farrington lying around on your e-mail or somewhere else?
— What Farrington?! — he stared at me in confusion.
— Farrington is the name of the font that has been used to type symbols on cards for 74 years now.
— Oh, no, I don't have it, — I didn't expect any other answer.
— Do you have any card designs? At least some approximate ones?
— No, I don't have that either, — Andre answered joylessly.
I opened the list of contacts on my ICQ — none of my familiar "photoshoppers" were online. It turned out that we were not able to draw a copy of the card ourselves.
- Seryoga, so what are we going to do? - Sasha asked me.
- Let's rely on the human factor and arrive at the airport an hour before departure - there will be long lines at the ticket offices, and the cashiers will be exhausted after a working day - perhaps they won't ask about the card.
My calculations were completely justified, and this time they gave us tickets without unnecessary delays. True, this was not the end of the surprises: at the check-in counter, the Polish border guards refused to let us on the flight, since our passports did not have transit Czech visas.
- But we are not leaving the Prague airport building, - I tried to explain to the border guard in broken English. - Look, we have an electronic ticket for the flight from Prague, - I showed him a printout from the Czech Airlines website.
Seeing that there was some kind of delay, a LOT representative came up to us and asked what was going on. We quickly explained. — Okay, guys, I’ll try to help you, — he volunteered. — I’ll call our airline representative in Prague now, and if he comes to an agreement with the Czechs, you’ll fly away.
— Thank you, — I hastened to thank him.
Over the next forty minutes, the LOT manager was unable to get through to his colleague.
— Let’s get out of here, Sasha, — I tugged my comrade by the sleeve. — He, — I pointed at the LOT employee, — is only pretending to be trying to help us. Apparently, the training of an employee of an exemplary European company does not allow him to give us a direct refusal.
— Yes, yes, — Andre agreed with me, — just wait a minute, — with these words, he went to the ticket office, handed over the plane tickets and asked for a refund to the card from which the payment was made.
— Why did you do this? — I did not quite understand the meaning of Sasha’s actions.
— It’s very simple: if the “sucker” notices that such an amount has disappeared from the card, there will be an investigation, and we flashed our real passports. And so — well, the money came back and came back — who knows where it was taken by mistake. Got it now?
I nodded in agreement.
We never flew to Cyprus. Not that day, nor the following ones. And thank God, I tell you. Why? It’s all scary — buying plane tickets with someone else’s “credit”. You flash your passport details, surveillance cameras record your face, and the time from ordering an electronic ticket to the minute of departure may be enough for the cardholder to discover the loss, report it to the right place, and as a result, upon arrival at your destination, you will be met with a completely different “reception” than you expected. Of course, you can always claim that you were set up - like, you bought a ticket for half price somewhere on the Internet - and some of my friends made money this way - but be that as it may, the carder doesn’t need extra exposure, right?
In the evening we got on the bus and went to Ukraine.

Chapter 14
Leviathan
- My dear, what kind of city is this?
- What, you don’t know?! It’s Arbatov!
- Ah, Arbatov!.. No wonder I see... this is not Rio de Janeiro!
From the film “The Golden Calf”
Odessa is one of those charming cities of Ukraine, the first glance at which sends you back to the best times of Ilf and Petrov. Narrow streets, cobbled in places, a light flair of provincialism, low prices compared to Minsk and the measured, leisurely way of life of its citizens. Renting a place to stay in the middle of the holiday season turned out to be impossible, and neither Andre nor I had any friends with whom we could stay in Odessa. For two days we literally lived on the beach. During the day we swam in the Black Sea and sunbathed. In the evening we drank with the locals and wandered around the city. At night we slept right on the sand, fortunately the warm southern climate allowed us to do so. Sasha “saved” on tickets again, and we had to walk the entire city. Deribasovskaya, French Boulevard, Grecheskaya… Odessa has forever taken a piece of my soul, and I love to return there again and again. It is especially nice there in early spring, when the riot of blossoming greenery amazes with its magnificence, and the sea, having rested over the winter from numerous and noisy bathers, exudes a thousand-year-old power and coolness.
A good third of the “fathers” of CarderPlanet lived in Odessa, including Script himself. I had only worked with Leviafan before, and since I happened to be in Odessa, it would be a sin not to meet him in real life.
“Hi, Philip,” I called Leviafan. “I’m in Odessa, passing through, we could meet.”
“Oh, hi, man.” Sure, man,” Philip turned out to be, as always, talkative. “Where are you? I’ll be there soon.
” “At McDonalds at the train station.”
“Okay, man, twenty minutes. Wait.”
Philip's dad was a big shot at the Odessa tax office, so Leviafan himself, who in real life turned out to be a dyed-in-the-wool red-haired Jew of about thirty, was not afraid of anything and so easily agreed to meet his fellow craftsmen.
"What brings you here, Serge?" Philip smiled affably and almost sparkled with some joy known only to him.
"Just passing through, by chance. We were flying to Cyprus on carded airline tickets, but the Poles turned us away - we didn't have a transit Czech visa. In the end, we ended up here.
" "And where next?" Leviafan asked, ordering cappuccino for us.
"My friend," I nodded at Sasha, "is going home to Minsk, and I'm going further south, to the resort town of N. We've been in Odessa for three days now - there was no one to stay with, so we spent the night on the beach.
" "Well, man, you're something else," Philip shook his head in surprise. — You could have called me, too.
— I only remembered about you today — I called right away. What’s that you have? — I noticed a plastic card in the Odessa man’s hands, very reminiscent of a VISA.
— Ah-ah, this is… real “plastic”… from Boa. Have you read the relevant section on “Planeta”?
— Of course I have. I’ve read the entire forum. Let me take a look, — I extended my hand and carefully, as if the card was made of glass, took it in my hands.
— Don’t look too much at the quality — there are better ones. However, for shopping within the Soviet Union, this is quite enough. When Boa came to “Planeta” and brought this topic to the masses, our income increased twentyfold, — Philip dreamily rolled his eyes to the sky.
— By the way, what does the nickname Boa stand for?
— Bank of America…
So I got acquainted in “real life” with something that radically changed my ideas about the scale of carding, increased my income many times over and became a very dangerous, but interesting and profitable occupation for the next few years.

Chapter 15
The First “Plastic”
Tolyan, an old acquaintance of mine, lived in the city of N., where I could stay if not for free, then for beer for sure. The main thing was that he had constant Internet, which for me, given the lack of money in my pockets, was especially important. Day after day I spent studying the invaluable information storehouses of “Planeta”, and “clothing” karting did not stand aside. Less than two weeks passed, when a coin jingled in my pockets again, and with it the opportunity appeared to give myself a short rest, visit discos and numerous coastal restaurants.
It so happened that the moderator of carder.org Flint24 was also vacationing in the same city with his wife. We started talking on ICQ, saw each other that evening and got drunk until six in the morning in our joy. I was nineteen, and I was flattered that I was communicating on equal terms with much more experienced, mature and respected carders. The euphoria of the fact that from now on the whole world of forbidden financial technologies and secrets was open to me was dizzying.
Alexey - that was Flint's name in real life - was about thirty years old, he was reasonable, calm as a boa constrictor and a very modest person. His wallet was literally stuffed with fake Boa cards.
- Look, Seryoga, this "plastic", - he took one card out of his wallet and showed me while we were drinking L owenbr? au in his kitchen, - from the first, so to speak, test batch released by the Boa Factory. It’s not particularly high quality — it’s printed on a card printer, the hologram is poorly glued, can be torn off with a fingernail, the signature strip is printed directly on the “plastic”, although it should be made of special paper, on which the word void appears as it wears out. In short, this card is about fifty percent closer to the original, no more. Here, compare, — Alexey took his real VISA Gold from some Moscow bank out of his pocket.
Alexey Stroganov — I read on the card.
— Lesha, tell me, do you need these cards from Voa now? — I began from afar.
— Not really — I came here to relax, not to work. Why not?
— Maybe you’ll give them to me? — I got up my nerve. — This is a new topic for me, I want to try it. If I work well, I’ll then tell you their cost and top them up.
“Okay, take it,” Flint agreed surprisingly easily. “Just be careful: shopping with counterfeit cards is an extremely extreme activity that goes against the criminal code. You need a serious approach here, you shouldn’t hope that this is a freebie, quick and easy money - everything is much more serious. This is work, and hard, nerve-wracking and very dangerous,” Alexey emphasized the last word, we drank more beer and lit a cigar. “You are not in any way insured against the fact that when you pay, Pick up (remove the card) or code 94 (a repeat transaction is when the real cardholder makes a purchase in America, and a minute later you send a request for authorization of the same credit card from Russia) will not be issued. Keep in mind that you also need to look appropriate.” A twenty-year-old student in ripped, albeit designer, jeans and a T-shirt, taking a gold VISA or, even cooler, a platinum AmEx from his pocket and buying, for example, a watch for ten, looks very suspicious. The first thing that will come to the seller's mind is that the carder has mugged some guy, taken his "Credit", and is now trying to buy goods with it. Even if the seller does not express his concerns, he will probably call the bank to make sure that the money will come to him later. And who needs that? Do you really need to be suspected, to be paid increased attention to? I think not. The less noticeable you are behind enemy lines, the better. After all, we are workers of the invisible front. Also, you should not immediately run up to the most expensive product and shout: "Wrap it up - I'm paying!" The seller is not a fool, he needs to sell the most expensive product possible, and he will offer it to you himself and will even persuade you to buy it. This way there is less suspicion. You do not buy right away, but ask in detail about the product. You ask to pack it and only after that, at the very end, you give the card. Because the bank can call right after the transaction, and if at this time the cashier is still packing your product ... in general, it is not good. And lastly, Seryoga, - added Lesha, when we had already finished our "Levenbrau" and got up from the table, - remember: politeness is the main weapon of a thief.
The next day Flint flew to Moscow, and that same day I tried one of his cards in action. I chose the store for the first time especially carefully: a quiet street, a small sportswear store, no security and three clearly unathletic sellers - in general, everything a soldier needs. I chose silver Nike sneakers, went to the cash register, took my VISA Classic card out of my pocket (the second card was Platinum), handed it to the girl... The cashier slowly swiped it through the POS terminal, entered the purchase amount, a long wait... and then the check came out of the POS - probably the best sound in my life. A sigh of relief. I signed the check. Suddenly, from somewhere off to the side, a second cashier - a girl with a rat's "tail":
- Your signature on the card is really worn out...
Of course - on the first cards from Boa Factory, it had to be literally scratched out on the "plastic".
— Yes, it’s from frequent use — I’m surprised myself how I managed to react so quickly.
The explanation seemed to satisfy me. A second sigh of relief. Sneakers under my arm, card in my pocket, “thank you for your purchase.” Yeah, you’re welcome.
The first experience was a success. In my mind, I should have “milked” this working card to the end, but my instinct for self-preservation told me that a nineteen-year-old boy buying expensive goods on a credit card in bulk, especially in a small town, could arouse suspicion. And the euphoria from the fact that my first shopping trip was so simple and successful prevented me from getting into the work mood.
I returned home, told Tolyan about my successes, dedicated him to the intricacies of working with “plastic” and gave him the remaining “platinum” card.
The next morning, before I had even had time to really wake up, Tolik appeared on the threshold with an armful of various “trophies” and began telling me in a voice shaky with excitement.
“Seryi, I first tried your “classic” from yesterday – it didn’t work anymore. But this card,” he took a Platinum card out of his pocket, “will probably last forever. Let’s go quickly. ”
I washed up, we had a quick breakfast and the two of us set off on a new shopping tour, which brought us a fair amount of gold, household appliances and expensive branded clothes.
* *
August arrived unnoticed. I had fully explored the “Real “plastic”” section on CarderPlanet, and “clothing” karting didn’t stay away either. It was time to go home. My significantly improved balance of payments allowed me to forget about trains, and I flew away by plane, which saved me nerves and time.
Flint — when I told him about the results of my work and transferred $600 — told me that he had organized the production of his own “plastic” in Moscow in partnership with Bigbaer, which was much better quality than Voa cards, and immediately gave me several samples through the conductor of the Moscow-Minsk train.
The guys took the easy way out and chose VISA Electron as an object for counterfeiting, which had no holograms and for personalization (applying the card number, expiration date and owner’s full name), which, unlike classic VISA and Mastercard, did not require expensive embossers.
Personalization of a real ElectronElectron is done by laser engraving. When I picked up samples from Flint & Co., I immediately noticed that the guys had simplified this process for themselves: instead of laser engraving, they used transparent, ultra-thin self-adhesive film, onto which data was applied using a regular laser printer. The film was glued to the front surface of the card, smoothed out and cut along the contour. Probably, after this, the card could have been heated with a hair dryer so that the film did not peel off - personally, I did this when turning Flint blanks into reusable "criminal tools" (you can't throw away $100 for one blank). In general, their cards were of excellent quality: offset printing, well-readable microfont, a strip for a signature with the inscription "void" appearing as it wears out - everything was up to standard.

Chapter 16
Who Killed Paul Khlebnikov
One evening, a character not quite typical for an inhabitant of the Minsk prison appeared on the threshold of our hut. Of average height, athletic build, in an expensive leather jacket Sean John, black coal-black eyes and black, like pitch, but already graying in places, hair. Just a man in black - I thought. A strong chin, a soft cat's gait, he looked about forty ... There was something defiantly contradictory in his whole appearance - behind the external calm and confidence that gave away in the newcomer a person familiar with the domestic penitentiary system, there was a huge internal tension - the stranger was like a compressed spring, ready at any moment to release the power hidden in it.
The twisted cotton wool (mattress, blanket, pillow) to the side:
- Hi, guys! My name is Walid.
The hut fell silent, looking at the newcomer with interest.
— Come in here, sit down (they don’t say “sit down” in prison), we’ll get acquainted now, — Dima Baton invited the stranger into our “walking room”. — Hey, someone there, — Dima called one of the assistants, — make some coffee, can’t you see — a guy has stopped by. Who, where from, why?” he turned to Valid.
— A Chechen. From Moscow. For the murder of Khlebnikov…
— Fuck, a killer! — I blurted out, forgetting all about tact — I subscribed to Forbes and knew about the murder of its editor-in-chief several months earlier.
— They took them from “Zhuravinka”, — the Chechen continued, — “Almaz”, about forty people. Plus the operatives — GUBOP, KGB. We were training quietly in the gym — suddenly, out of nowhere, from all the windows and cracks, masked shows poured out like cockroaches. They put us down quickly, naturally. Accused of violating passport regulations, then two weeks in a special detention center and here.
- Who in life? - Baton asked.
- A thug, - Valid answered confidently.
- Well, come here, - Dima pointed to a free bunk in the far corner of our "walk-in". - Make yourself comfortable, rest - you must be tired in the "sedimentation center". The morning is wiser than the evening.
In prison, I easily got along with people of different views, ages and social status - I found a common language with Walid. The very next day I played chess with him, during the game I learned details of my new acquaintance's life. It turned out that Walid Agayev, along with Kazbek Dukuzov (known in Moscow by the nickname Cherny), who was also detained with him, were the main suspects in the murder of Paul Klebnikov. In Belarus, they were charged only with violating the passport and visa regime, which in our country, which occupies an intermediate position between Russia and the West, was a serious offense. And Dukuzov was also accused of resisting the authorities: being a master of sports in boxing and judo, he had beaten up several special forces soldiers, and now the guys were awaiting extradition to Russia. Walid was a master of sports in freestyle wrestling, and at one time, together with his brother Mamed (Walid called him Musik), he even competed for the Moscow team.
He wasn't very good at chess. Or maybe he was losing to me on purpose, using a slightly modified principle: "If you want to win someone over, let them win an argument."
Immediately after the arrest of Agayev and Dukuzov, all the world's media outlets vied with each other to trumpet their involvement in Khlebnikov's murder.
"Walid, how did you get busted?" I once asked the Chechen. "How did they even get to you?
" "The damn cell phones are to blame for everything," Walid's face distorted with annoyance. "It seems like they called the customer right from the crime scene. No, tell me: everyone knows that the cell phone is one of the greatest inventions of mankind, giving us freedom of communication and movement. At the same time, few people think about the fact that the cell phone is also an excellent radio beacon, allowing you to track any movements of the subscriber in space. The entire territory covered by mobile communications is divided into cells equipped with their own towers, or base stations. Each tower has a clear address. As a result, the technical information about a specific connection contains not only the phone number of the subscriber you contacted, but also the address of the tower through which the switching was carried out. In addition, the so-called sector is recorded - that is, information about where the caller was located relative to the tower (north, south, west or east). In addition, the technical capabilities of the equipment of cellular companies make it possible to determine the signal strength, which, in turn, indicates where the subscriber was at the time of the conversation - on the street, in a car or in a building. By tracking the caller's movements from one tower to another, you can plot his route with an error of up to 300-500 meters.
- Is it possible to somehow protect yourself from such billing tracking?
- It is possible - never use a mobile phone.
- Walid, but if you know everything so well, then why did you step on this rake yourself?
— It wasn’t me, bro, it was one of my guys. And the cops took a printout of all the calls from the cell phone company where the journalist was killed, worked on it, figured out our numbers and wiretapped them.
— By the way, there’s a thing that allows you to intercept and listen in on GSM directly from the airwaves. The prosecutor’s sanction, as you understand, is not at all necessary for this. It’s called GSS Pro-A. It’s made in Canada, costs about $400,000 and fits in a small suitcase. I saw it on global-security-solutions.com. Of course, there are cheaper ones, but this system is the best. It’s completely invisible and undetectable, has high performance, and can be further upgraded, multi-channel (4x, 20x or 100 subscribers) intercepting cell phones and recording both information about conversations and the conversations themselves. The system has a built-in complex RF locator, which uses triangulation to determine the location of an object with an accuracy of up to two meters, including inside buildings and on a specific floor. GSS Pro-A operates unnoticed by the phone of the wiretapped object and the GSM mobile operator. The system also intercepts SMS, fax and e-mail. Your FSB definitely has it.
- Yeah... Not much good, - Walid said thoughtfully. - But I keep wondering how they found us in Minsk?.. They left Moscow in an unknown direction, lived in a residential area in Minsk with fellow countrymen, and were not particularly visible anywhere...
- Well, yes, they drove a Mercedes CL with AMG tuning, for two hundred thousand bucks, hung out in "Zhuravinka" every day, and what kind of handset did you have?! Vertu Signature, for 25k... But otherwise, yes, "were not visible anywhere"... For Belarus, all this is too much. By the way, Walid, is it true that the secret services can secretly and without your knowledge remotely turn on the microphone of a phone in order to listen in on conversations that take place in the immediate vicinity of such a bugged phone?
- Rumors about the ability of a mobile phone to work as a listening device have been circulating for quite some time. But recently this information was confirmed during the consideration of the case of the famous Genovese mafia family in the Southern District of New York. To spy on the mafia, the FBI used a program called roving bug - remotely activated mobile phones of suspects transmitted all their conversations to the FBI listening station. The device functioned regardless of whether the phone was on or off. Of course, this happens with the sanction of the court and with the full cooperation of mobile operators, but is this a problem for the secret services?
- Walid, and how can we fight this? - What I heard puzzled me quite a bit.
— The only way is not just to turn off your phone, but also to remove the battery. Or not to have conversations on the phone or near it that might interest the government. By the way, if your car has a GPS navigator, it’s better to turn it off. The principle is the same: the cops, with the help of the mechanics at your service station, can reprogram it — discreetly turn on the microphone and get the ability to hear everything that’s going on in the car.
— And when they locked you up, did they put you on video surveillance?
— Yeah. They took a photo — full face/profile, filmed you on video, took fingerprints, as well as samples of your handwriting and voice.
— Do you know why? — I decided to enlighten my friend a little.
— Well, with the video and photo it’s clear. With the handwriting too. And what the hell do they need your voice for?
— Our voice, like fingerprints, has unique parameters that make it easy to identify a person. Identifying the fingerprint of one person out of 10 million takes less than a minute. Identifying one unique voice from the same 10 million samples takes about the same amount of time. Once you have recorded the parameters of your voice, it is easy to track all your mobile phone conversations, regardless of which SIM cards you use, even if you change them every hour. The largest database of criminal voices to date has been collected in Mexico - about a million offenders' voices. The database is stored in an underground bunker in Mexico City along with other data on the criminal world. Now a similar database is being collected in Belarus. Both openly ("video recording") and quietly. You call, for example, the support service of your mobile operator, and while you are waiting for an answer, the robot tells you: "To ensure higher quality of service, the conversation is being recorded." In short, now there is no point in registering your "SIM card" to other people. Or at railway and bus stations: "To prevent possible conflicts between passengers and cashiers, conversations are recorded"... By the way, GSS Pro-A also has a built-in voice recognition system (using military RF triangulation technology). Terrorists are often identified by their voice.
- Oh, do you know how they "pack" Chechens in Moscow? - my friend perked up. - Especially after all these explosions of apartment buildings...
- No, I don't know.
- You're walking around the supermarket, choosing something, putting it in the cart, busy, basically. At this time, a pickpocket, sent by the cops, plants a piece of TNT in your pocket. At the exit, there's a search - you're a suspect, blah-blah-blah, let's examine the contents of your pockets. Well, of course, you, afraid that the cops might plant something, reach into your pockets yourself and start turning them out - look, like, there's nothing. At this point, TNT gets on your skin and under your nails, and there’s no way you can prove that it was planted on you—any expert will tell you that, in addition to the presence of explosives in your pockets, traces of it were also found on your hands.
— And how can you avoid that? Anyone can be put in jail — some with explosives, others with drugs...
— When the cops stop you, they can ask you to show them your pockets and things. You can agree, but — surprise — you can also refuse, because without witnesses and a report, they themselves have no right to rummage through your things and touch them. Therefore, a request to take everything out and show it is just a trick of the cops. If you intend to act in accordance with the law, then demand two witnesses of the same sex as you (preferably with local registration), a search of the premises and a report. If the cops suspect that, apart from extra money, you have nothing interesting, then, having met such demands, they will most likely be too lazy to take you to the station and look for witnesses. And they will let you go. The same applies to searching for prohibited items, such as weapons and drugs, in a car. According to Russian law, a vehicle can be searched on the street, but again — with the presence of witnesses and a report. In another situation, you can politely refuse to have your car searched and ask the law enforcement officers to do everything according to the law...
Valid Agayev lived on Kutuzovsky, loved to play football and, as I understood from our long conversations, was, as they say now, an "authoritative businessman". At the same time, he did not boast about his wealth at all, but was a modest man, brought up in accordance with strict mountain traditions. I asked him questions about the sources of his income, to which Valid replied that in his free time he trained freestyle athletes, and earned money by renting out several containers that he owned at the Cherkizovsky market. Many years ago, these twenty-foot containers for sea transportation cost him $5 thousand each, but today the price of one was approaching $50 thousand. Each tenant paid Agayev "ten" a month, and he did not particularly care about his daily bread. "If you want, I'll help you get a couple of containers when you're released. They "fight back" in six months," Walid offered me and invited me to move to Moscow. Many of the Caucasians I had to deal with were rather slippery and unpleasant types, but some kind of inner warmth and sincerity emanated from Walid and I felt very comfortable and interested in talking to him.
In difficult prison conditions, Agayev was and remained a devout Muslim - he did not eat any meat and ate only Rollton until Phil, using his connections among the prison cops, established a "route" with the Chechen's relatives and a parcel of lamb, fatback (lamb fat) and horse meat arrived. There was also a prayer rug there, and Walid prayed fervently five times a day.
One day, Walid asked Phil to pass on some food pleasing to Allah to the neighboring hut.
“Friend, who do you want to pass all this on to?” I asked curiously.
— When I arrived at the prison, — answered Valid, — I searched for Caucasians in the “malyavki”. There’s a Dagestani in the next cell, I wrote to him — and he complained that he doesn’t eat any of the wrong food, he’s lost all his weight.
— What’s his nickname? — asked Filonov.
— Borz. In Chechen, it means “wolf”.
— Valid, — I intervened in the conversation, — he’s not a wolf, but a devil. The real name of this half-Dagestani is Sasha Doskin, I was caught with him in 144. He introduces himself differently in every new cell, “the godfather’s hen”, and he eats lard with both cheeks — mostly other people’s,” I told the Chechen, who instantly became gloomy.
— Okay, let’s pass this “warmth” on to him, — Valid insisted, — I already promised him.
After that, Agayev didn’t communicate with him.
Kazbek Dukuzov, Valid's accomplice, was sitting in a special corridor - in damp cells for two people, with arched vaults, from which, due to the dampness, flakes of whitewash constantly fell off and unpleasantly got stuck in your hair, with a fifteen-watt light bulb covered with shockproof acrylic glass, with bars, steel shields, mesh and other "muzzles" and barriers on the windows - so that it was impossible to work together and send a "message" - apparently, they were very afraid of Kazbek.
The special corridor, also known as the s/k, is the most sinister place in the prison. Sixteen huts, hidden behind an armored door with an electric lock, a separate guard. The especially dangerous ones are kept here: rebels, organized crime leaders, those sentenced to the "death penalty" and simply those who need to be very well hidden. Walls a meter thick, through which not a single extraneous sound penetrates, vaulted ceilings - just like in the film "Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession", two single-tier bunks at a height of ten centimeters from the floor, an iron table, an iron cabinet for toiletries, a shelf in the corner and silence... deathly - no radio, no TV, no phone reception. The huts are in the basement - the windows look out to ground level. It is very damp - clothes hung out to dry after the bathhouse do not dry even in three days. There is no connection with the outside world or even with the neighboring huts, it is impossible to work together - the windows are not covered with glass, like everywhere else, and not even with a grate with "eyelashes" - blinds - in the path of your "little note" there are at least five obstacles: a grate, glass, a solid iron sheet with holes the diameter of a cigarette, "eyelashes", a "muzzle" shaped like an antediluvian Soviet air conditioner, and a metal mesh to top it off. In the valley, it is also not an option - knives are installed in the pipes, on which "horses" are cut. Due to insufficient lighting, you can neither read, nor write. And what can you do? Spit on the ceiling and think about the transience of everything. And sleep 15-16 hours a day. Sleep restlessly, jumping up in a cold sweat because of another nightmare. This is probably from the negative energy accumulated in the walls over the centuries and the suffering of the guests of the "s/k-hilton". Blood, murders, the walls themselves are oppressive. And silence...

Chapter 17
Auctions
Our Skumbrievich confessed, couldn't stand the confrontation. He let us down!
Ostap Bender
- Where did you meet your accomplices? - Investigator Makarevich began a week later.
- What other accomplices?! - I asked in response with feigned surprise.
- Oh, come on, don't "rehearse" that you don't know them, - Makarevich clearly didn't want to waste his time. - With Batyuk and Voropayev.
- I don't know who you're talking about.
- I repeat the question: when and under what circumstances did you meet Pavel Vladimirovich Voropayev and Stepan Leonidovich Batyuk?
- This is the first time I've heard of them, - I continued to play.
- And where did their photos on your laptop come from?! - the investigator began to lose his temper.
Damn, I forgot about the photos. So the question arises: why the hell would you keep photos of accomplices on your work computer, especially with whom you haven't spoken for almost two years?! And here I overlooked...
- Okay, let's have a confrontation, maybe you'll remember, - Makar said goodbye.
Six days later he called me again. My lawyer was already in the office. The investigator looked out the door, said something to the duty controller, and a minute later Pasha Voropaev was brought into the room.
- Hello, Seryoga, - Pavel was clearly glad to see me and extended his hand to me. I hesitantly shook his dry palm and began to closely examine his face, showing with my whole appearance that I was trying to remember whether I had seen him before.
- Well, will you recognize him now? - the investigator carefully watched my reaction.
- This is the first time I've seen him.
- Okay, Pasha, - Makarevich switched to my accomplice, - who is this man? - He gestured at me.
- Pavlovich Sergey. He was the one who forced us to buy goods in the Minsk stores, - Voropaev began confidently.
Hmm... it's loaded from the start... "he forced us"... - it's disgusting to listen to...
- Pavel, when did you meet? - the investigator continued.
- In November 2004...
I had to repeat a similar performance with Stepan, whom Makar brought to the pretrial detention center the next day specifically for a confrontation with me.
- You shouldn't do that, Polisdog, - Makarevich advised me with almost fatherly "concern", - the judges won't like that you're in complete refusal.
- Well, I'm not advising you to sleep with your wife, - I got angry.
- Okay, don't get so worked up, - he said in a conciliatory tone. - Do you recognize the laptop?
I glanced furtively at the Toshiba Satellite, which stood on the table with a portable inkjet printer connected to it.
- I've never seen one before.
Makar smiled.
Of course, I recognized it – this is my first laptop, which Pasha and Stepa stole with a plastic card in Poland, and then I gave it to Nikron.
“By the way, how did you meet Nikron?” Makarevich asked, as if guessing what I was thinking.
“Somewhere on the Internet, in 2002.”
— Where exactly?
Yeah, that's what I told you.
I found Nicron on Planeta. Why "found"? At the time, I was thinking about "scamming" online auctions and was looking for suppliers of hacked accounts for the eBay auction. Nicron turned out to be one of those sellers.
eBay has never been just a trading platform — it's more of an exhibition of human whims, where you can find anything: from the right to permanently tattoo your advertisement on someone's forehead ($10,000) and a Honus Wagner baseball card ($1.65 million) to a round of golf with legendary golfer Tiger Woods ($425,000) and debris from the Mir space station.
Many people started with auctions — this type of carding did not require any special knowledge or investment (except for "cardboard") and, if done properly, provided a good income. The most common fraudulent technique on eBay was and remains the sale of a non-existent product.
In short, the scheme of work is as follows: register as a seller - for this you need information about your credit card. Enter it, and if everything is ok, then $1 is withdrawn from the credit card for registration. From the same card, you pay the fees for listing the lot for sale. To start, you sell some small electronics, for example, a portable DVD player for $150-200. You can’t go any higher - all goods on eBay are divided into risk groups according to their popularity with scammers, and if you list a digital camera, video camera, laptop, mobile phone or LCD monitor from a new account, your account will be closed immediately. The winner of the auction pays you by check or money order. You can persuade them to use wire transfer or even Western Union. After payment, the buyer, of course, waits for their goods. Meanwhile, you need to contact the drop and quickly drive him to the bank so that he can cash the check. Sometimes it takes a few days. Your "sucker" starts to complain: "Where is my product? I'll cancel the payment." How to buy time? You call the drop:
- Hey, Vasya, go to the post office and send a brick or something of suitable weight to such and such an address. Did you do it? Well done. Give me the tracking number...
That's it, the "sucker" is calm, and we have a couple of days.
However, for greater success of the scam, it is better to list the goods not from a newly registered account, but from the name of a seller with a lot of positive reviews (feedbacks). How to do this? You can inflate the rating of a new seller account with the help of fake buyers. You can hack a site that stores information about users' eBay accounts. You can... Nicron hacked eBay itself
Nicron's brother, Scorpo, one of the strongest hackers in the world, was at that time the main supplier of dumps on the world underground Internet market. I was a moderator of several sections on a small carding forum LNCrew and for some time I traded Nicron's eBay accounts there and on "Planet". True, their sale was associated with the emergence of many controversial situations with buyers, and I gradually reduced it to nothing. But it turned out that Nicron also had a lot of dumps, and their sale was hundreds of times more profitable than trading in accounts for auctions, short ICQ numbers, "cardboard" and other small stuff that I was doing before meeting Nicron. So I became a dump seller.

Chapter 18
Nicron
"Who is Boris Drankman?" Galina Arkadyevna asked me in a whisper when Makar went somewhere from the office. — This is Nikron, the investigator asked about?
— Yes, it is him. But how do you know about him?
— I got it through my channels. Your accomplices turned him in too. How did he end up in Minsk?
— In March 2003, Borya had big troubles: a thief in law, with whom Nikron was friends and socialized, was shot dead in his own car with a TT pistol. Borya was next to him when the killer ran up and emptied the entire clip into the crime lord in a second. Dying, he covered Boris with his body. True, one of the bullets went right through, hit Nikron and broke his rib. It became too dangerous for Borya to be in Komi, and without thinking twice, I invited him to Minsk. He immediately agreed.
Boris turned out to be a smart and well-mannered guy of my age, he respected the work of Mikhail Krug, adored McDonalds and was quite sentimental. We rented an apartment in the city center, and from that moment on I never lived with my parents again. Nikron hacked various websites and payment systems on the Internet every day, I sold dumps from a database of more than a million that Boris owned together with his brother Scorpo, and we had no problems with money. Together with Jungi — capo di capi from Planeta — we were involved in refunds (voluntary return of funds from the seller's account to the buyer's card account). We hacked online stores, gained access to their merchants, withdrew several dollars from thousands of credit cards, accumulated the money in one account and made a refund to one of Dzhangi's cards. He cashed them in ATMs and sent us our honestly earned 50%. We also used these merchants to check the "plastic" before working in stores. Later, Nikron taught me how to use the Fluxay scanner to search for vulnerabilities, showed me how to do SQL injection, and I often hacked myself. True, more on small things - difficult "targets" were not given to me.
- And where is Nikron now, do you by any chance know? - investigator Makarevich asked me in an ingratiating tone when he returned.
- No, I don't know, - although I knew perfectly well not only the city, but also the exact address where Boris lived.
— I can tell you how he managed to get away from us, — Makarevich tried to arouse my interest in the conversation.
— And I know, Borya told me.
“So I’m leaving the apartment (I lived on the third floor),” I recalled Nikron’s story in detail, “and there are cops in the entryway. I didn’t lose my head — I kicked one in the balls, and the other in the throat with the edge of my palm, after all, I served in the special forces sapper unit. I ran out of the entryway, jumped into my car and hit the gas. I drove around the house — Natasha threw my laptop and encoder out of the window, blew me a kiss goodbye — and off to Russia. To hell with your Belarus.”
— Well, that’s not exactly how it happened. But our operatives really screwed up: they were waiting for him at the entrance, Nikron came out, quickly got into his Mercedes, locked the doors, and when the operatives ran up to the car and put their police ID to the glass, he turned around and drove away. He almost crushed our agent. And he also came up with this… “sapper special forces”…
- What difference does it make! The main thing is that Nikron did absolutely the right thing: he didn’t lose his head, he remained unperturbed and thus saved his freedom and future. Now look for the wind in the field.
- Okay, all this is poetry, - Makar interrupted my reasoning. - Tell me better how you ended up in Kiev.
In Kiev…
* *
On March 22, 2003, Voa and Liratto were arrested in Cyprus, and Russian manufacturers of counterfeit “plastic” suffered their first losses. This news made a lot of noise on CarderPlanet, and people who decided to make money on a big name did not keep us waiting long. Both on forums and in "soapboxes" there was a lot of spam offering passport re-sticking services, etc. They had three things in common: the presence of the magic words Boa Factory in the address bar, a complete copy of the Boa website, and the fact that ordinary rippers (scammers) were behind all of this.
At the same time, I urgently needed some equipment for making cards, and I randomly dialed the old Liratto number in the hope that one of the remaining Boa Factory employees would pick up the phone. I unexpectedly received an answer - a man who introduced himself as Alexander, told me about the details of the arrest of Boa and Liratto, asked who I was, what I did, told me what they, in turn, could do, and left contact information. In April, Sasha and his partner Sergey came to Minsk and brought the equipment I needed.
Less than three months had passed since the arrest of Boa Factory, when the members of the RealPlastic.org syndicate Flint, Bigbuyer and Michael were also detained in Moscow. Gabrik, who supplied them with dumps from Nikron and Scorpo, was put on the international wanted list, and his portrait adorned the FSB website for a long time. A fundraiser for the guys from RealPlastic.org was immediately organized on Planeta: we understood that something like this could happen to any of us. I don’t remember how much money we managed to raise, but there were plenty of sympathizers.
A couple of days after the destruction of Flint's office, my mother called me and said that our house had been searched. I didn't know the exact reason, and there could have been several: our trips to Minsk stores together with Pasha and Styopa, and the development of Flint's social circle, and so on. I decided not to tempt fate and immediately left for Poland, and from there to Ukraine.

Chapter 19
The First $100
"Sergey, what did the cops tell you?" Valid asked sympathetically when I finally returned to the cell.
"Everything is bad, brother. The accomplices are 'loading'. They've turned in not only me, but also my closest partner, I don't know what to do. So far, they've refused." "
Try to find a compromise with the cops. If you need money, give it to them. If you don't have enough, go into debt. No amount of money can replace freedom. And judging by everything, you'll always be able to earn a living. How old are you, by the way?
" "Twenty-one."
— Young, but precocious. How did you even come to this?
— My “entrepreneurial” talent woke up early. At the age of five, I was already passing off rosin as amber and exchanging it for various things I needed: badges, batteries, fish hooks, cartridges, arrowheads. Who did I “palm off” on? The same village boys as myself, only a little older — they had never seen that amber either. Later, I collected non-ferrous metals — brass radiators, copper wires, old transformers. That’s how I earned my first $100. In the mid-1990s, it became really fun. At first, everyone was selling/reselling red mercury, which doesn’t even exist in nature. Then German Singer sewing machines — there was a rumor that their base was cast from Nazi gold and painted black to throw off attention. Everyone rushed to look for these Singers and try to resell them. I remember I found three of them, left a $70 deposit for one, brought it to the buyer, and this smart guy said: “But this is not a Singer, it’s an Austrian Singer. Idiot - “Singer” in German is written as Singer.” It was an interesting time. After that, I worked as a manager at my stepfather’s service station for two whole months, but this Bad Man didn’t pay me. So I went into crime. And all I needed was $200-300 a month.
“When an entrepreneur doesn’t find an opportunity to realize himself, he becomes a fraud,” Walid said philosophically.
“Well, it is, brother.
” “Why did you go into Internet crime?”
“I got a personal computer when I was twelve - many people only had Dandy consoles. And the Internet almost immediately. I was like a fish in water there. Do you know what "clothes" karting is?
The Chechen shook his head.
— There used to be few online stores, and to buy something you just had to enter your credit card number and shipping address in a simple HTML form. Once, around 1998, my brother and I were playing Quake online: we connected two computers with a cable via COM ports, accessed the Internet from one of them via a modem, and shared the power of one Internet channel between the two of us. We got tired of playing — Dima went to some music sites, and I read the news.
— Brother, do you have a “cardboard”? — Dima distracted me from reading.
— I do, but why do you need one?
— Open the file for public access, and I’ll go from my computer. I want to buy a music album.
— I opened it. Look on disk D.
— What is a “cardboard”? — Walid clarified.
— To make a purchase online, you only need to know the card number, its expiration date, and full name. owner and CVV2 — a three- or four-digit security code that is located on the signature strip on the back of the card and is used to verify its authenticity when paying online. In narrow circles, this is called "cardboard". I came across it by accident: one of my online acquaintances was looking for where to buy these very credit cards, I offered to help and very quickly found it on the bulletin board of the "Computer Newspaper". At that time, it was the blackest online flea market in Belarus. Not only did they sell credit cards there, but they also bought and sold stolen goods with them. At that time, the police still used typewriters, and even then, not all officers knew which side to approach it from. Small wholesale "cardboard" was sold somewhere for a dollar.
My brother typed something into a form somewhere (he knew English better than me), indicated the address of one of our mutual acquaintances as the delivery address, and a week later a branded Deep Purple concert CD ended up in our hands. That's how it all started.
In the mid-1990s, no one knew about credit card scams, and the rare cases of money going missing were mistakes by stores and banks. Therefore, fearless online stores willingly accepted non-existent cards, the number of which was generated using the same algorithm as real cards. The fraud was only discovered at the end of the month, when stores requested banks to transfer money from the cards to pay for the goods. It is clear that the store did not receive the money, since the requested credit cards simply did not exist. While the owners of American stores came to their senses and stopped blindly fulfilling orders from Russia and Eastern Europe, many greedy carders managed to make a fortune.
Of course, we understood that we were doing, to put it mildly, not quite a legal business, so we never ordered goods to our home addresses, but used front men for this, whom we called drops (from the English drop - "to throw"). They were found mainly among people predisposed to alcohol, as well as distant relatives. They were often used in the dark. American journalists came up with the name "money mule" (or cash-out mule) for the drops who receive cash from other people's credit cards at ATMs.
There were practically no criteria for selecting goods, they dragged everything that was lying around. First of all, of course, computer components, LCD monitors and televisions, digital cameras, video cameras, laptops and mobile phones - that is, very rare and popular goods in the post-Soviet space. The most pressing issue was selling the stolen goods — Minsk companies found out about the sources of origin of the goods and brazenly knocked down prices to 30-40% of the market price. However, this was also profitable: we had an established distribution system, computer stores had their own commissions, and consumers did not experience a shortage in purchasing the most modern and sophisticated equipment.
Many carders had their own “nailed” customs officers or couriers from UPS, DHL, FedEx and TNT, who would deliver the goods directly to your home for 10-15% of the invoice value. True, sometimes there were hitches — it was not always possible to tell your person the parcel number (tracking number) in advance, or the necessary people were on vacation. You had to grab the drop in your arms and drag yourself to customs.
One morning, I remember, my drop Andrey Nazarov called me:
- Gray, hi. I received a parcel here — a notice about it was thrown into the mailbox. Have you ordered anything?
— No, damn it, your grandma from America sent you a present. I ordered a lot of things, of course. How can we find out what exactly they sent… Did you call customs?
— I called.
— So what?
— They told us to come to Minsk-2 Airport and pick up the parcel. And quickly, otherwise in two weeks we’ll be paying $1 a day for storage.
— Well then, let’s go.
— When?
— Right now. Or don’t you need money?
— You’re telling me, — Nazarov grumbled discontentedly into the phone. — In an hour at the Moskovsky bus station, okay?
— Agreed.
Soon we were already boarding a bus heading to Minsk-2 Airport. Despite the short distance (40 kilometers), the journey there took more than an hour.
— Dear sir, where is customs here? — I asked a random passerby when the bus dropped us off at the final stop. - Aaa, you still have to
walk waa ...



There was nothing to do - we lit up and trudged off. Here was customs. We showed our passports - the airport was a restricted area - and received temporary passes. We found the right building. What did we have here? DHL, UPS, Federal Express signs, couriers in nice uniforms and branded vans. Here were the customs officers' offices. And a line, as always in all government agencies in the Soviet Union. At least it was small - only about ten people.
- Tell me, do they issue parcels here? - Yes, here. But first you need to fill out the paperwork and, perhaps, pay customs duties. They process about one person an hour.
- What a piece of shit! - I cursed under my breath in Russian. - Who's the last one?
- Are you a private individual? - asked a pretty but tired-looking lady, apparently a petty office clerk.
- The absolute best, - answered Andrey the drop.
- Then you need to go to the other office, it’s twice as fast there, - the young lady smiled. - There are only companies here.
- Thank you.
We find the right door. We wait, smoke. Smoke again. There are almost no cigarettes left, we’ll have to take more next time. Finally, we go in.
- Hello, we need to pick up a parcel, here’s a notice.
- Who’s Nazarov? - asked the mustachioed customs officer in a gray uniform shirt.
I left the office, Andrey stayed. He was gone for half an hour, an hour. Finally, he came out.
- Well, what’s there? - I asked him.
- Some clothes. From Abercrombie & Fitch. Cool, youthful. Did you order? For half a thousand bucks…
- Yeah. What’s taking so long? I thought you’d already been “accepted.”
- That’s what I thought too.
- What do you mean?!
- Well, I gave the inspector my passport, and he gave me an invoice - some kind of paper, like a consignment note - read it, he said. There's the address of the shop, its name, a list of goods, and their cost. I reach out to take my passport, and the customs officer abruptly hid it in his desk drawer. I look and don't get what's going on. The customs officer squints and says to me with a sly look: "Are you, by any chance, a young hacker?" And I say: "What kind of hacker am I? I don't even have a computer." He stared at me for another minute, and then started filling out the paperwork.
- At least not a report?
- No, I'm not.
- Of course, it was a shame that we went to him together. We'll be more careful in the future. Andrey, how do you know that there are five hundred bucks' worth of goods there? I remember well that I asked the store to lower the price on the invoice to $90 so that I wouldn't have to pay customs duties.
- The customs officer said: "We should re-evaluate the goods - there's at least five hundred dollars' worth of them here." But then he changed his mind. The end of the working day, probably Friday - who wants to work?
- Exactly. The human factor.
- And you, Gray, where have you been all this time?
— At first I smoked like crazy until I ran out of cigarettes. Then I went outside, wandered around the yard, walked in circles — paranoia, you know, you’ve been gone for an hour. Then I came across something interesting.
— What?
— None of your business! Better go get the parcel. The inspector has probably already processed everything.
— Okay, wait. Here’s a cigarette.
Andrey left. The “betrayal” started to hammer at me again — how much did it cost the customs officer to call the police while we were gone?..
Nazarov appeared 20 minutes later. Pleased and beaming, with a branded DHL box in his hands.
— Let’s get out of here, — I pulled him by the sleeve.
— That’s true, — my drop replied, and we left the customs territory.
— Sergey, what did you find there? — Andrey started whining when we were already riding on the bus.
— Where there?
— Well, in the yard.
— Ah-ah, the addresses of the shops. That still send goods to our long-suffering Belarus.
— So what?
— You don’t get it at all? — I was amazed at his stupidity. — Although, yeah, where do you need it, a drop is a drop. There are garbage containers in the customs yard where the cleaners throw out empty boxes from parcels. Do you get it now?
— Not really.
— The boxes have the web addresses of the shops that still work with our country written on them. They’re worth their weight in gold now.
— Seryoga, uh-uh, were you rummaging through the trash?
— No, damn it, I’ll buy one address of a sending shop for $50–100. It’s a good thing they picked up the parcel quickly — the people in line were saying that sometimes they have to travel for two days to get one parcel.
At that time, the airport's temporary storage warehouses were literally filled with MP3 players from diamond.com, guitars, advanced home appliances from hammacher.com, metal detectors, PDAs, clothing and other goods. Customs officers also did not lose out - they quickly learned to distinguish carder parcels from ordinary ones, they could easily hint to the drop about the questionable origin of the goods and ask to come for the parcel in a few days. They, understandably, got scared and did not come again. According to the existing rules, customs officers were supposed to send unclaimed goods back, but in practice, a huge number of our parcels disappeared in the corridors of customs and settled in the pockets of inspectors as hard cash.
Parcels often had to be cleared through customs. This happened if their invoice value exceeded $ 100. The amount of the state duty was 30% of the value for individuals and 50% for legal entities. Moreover, this duty was calculated not only on the price of the goods, but also on the cost of delivery. Can you imagine how absurd it was?
Walid silently shook his head.
- Let's say they send you a refrigerator. The price on the invoice is $90. The cost of delivery is $300. This means that customs clearance will be $390 x 0.3 = $130. It is clear that many such parcels were not picked up.
In 1999, most American online stores stopped fulfilling orders from the CIS countries altogether, and those who still worked with us began to pay close attention to the fact that the shipping address matched the billing address. Often they asked for a scan of both sides of the credit card, which had to be drawn in Photoshop. The correct configuration of the computer from which orders were made also acquired great importance - it was necessary to create a complete illusion that you really are a rich John Smith from Nevada and want to buy a couple of laptops for "three rubles" each. It was necessary to use only the English version of Windows, set the time zone corresponding to the country from which the order was made, the store could be wary even if the Russian language was available for keyboard input. Well, think for yourself, what kind of pervert would sit under a Russian "Windows", living in America, and even with the name John Smith? Similarly, it was necessary to use a proxy server to hide your real IP address, and it is desirable that the IP of this proxy server correspond to the state, and even better, the city of the card owner. There was one problem here: the Americans understood perfectly well that if a person went under a proxy, then he has something to hide. And what can you hide? Of course, your real location. And even if you had a proxy that corresponded to the desired state a thousand times, you would be sent for a walk in the woods. This is why socks-proxy were needed, hanging on a non-standard port, so that the store would not notice the substitution of the real IP address. At the same time, the excellent service 5socks.net appeared and is still alive.
The human factor should also be taken into account: for example, Americans most often make purchases on the Internet either during their lunch break at work or in the evening at home. Accordingly, during these hours, online stores receive the most applications and your order will have less chance of attracting the attention of managers. In addition, it was worth paying attention to official holidays in the country from which you were ordering: orders made on holidays were processed only after several days, and this delay could be fatal. All this complicated the already difficult process of ordering goods from American stores. I had to pick up a dictionary and start "hammering" German, Spanish and French stores, which until then had remained pristine from the encroachments of carders. I then really "sat down" on the Sotheby's auction.
There were no mobile phones, computer parts, laptops or cameras at Sotheby's, but there was a lot of jewelry, watches from famous brands, paintings, etc. You could enter two credit cards at once in the payment form at Sotheby's, and if there was no money on one, the auction house would automatically withdraw money from the other. True, Belarus was not in the destination country, but I easily solved this problem - Germany was selected as the delivery location, and Weissrussland was entered several times in the address field, which means Belarus in German. In Germany, where there was a very large cargo receiving hub, everyone knew and sent to us.
In mid-1999, the world of Belarusian carders-"things" learned about the existence of the largest online store of books and CDs barnesandnoble.com. It sent CDs, and how it sent! It was just a song - by the beginning of 2000, a huge warehouse, consisting of many hangars, was half filled with parcels from B&N. All over the CIS, branded discs and gift versions of Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin began to sell at bargain prices. And what happened to the store when it started selling the first e-book readers! The price for them in Minsk did not exceed $100-150 (with their nominal value of $300-400). Then a way was found to buy up in Moscow, and barnesandnoble.com simply “sewed up” in our orders. So it sent for more than a year and, by the most conservative estimates, suffered losses of about $1.5 million.
In 2000, theft of goods by customs and couriers flourished. The famous lingerie store VictoriasSecret.com, which sent via FedEx, simply got lost in the depths of customs, and couriers kept every third parcel for themselves. The same Abercrombie became a gold mine for DHL — the entire customs office was strewn with gutted parcels from this fashion store. At the same time, I had to order goods that were not very popular, but pleasant in all respects: excellent Swiss pocket knives Victorinox, binoculars, blood pressure monitors, perfume, expensive cosmetics and flowers.
Once I had a big fight with the famous Belarusian “clothing store” BuyMicro. I was wrong, but I could not correct the misunderstanding due to the existing financial problems. BuyMicro constantly called me at home and made threats. At first, I took them seriously, but then stopped paying attention — a dog that barks does not bite. A month later, I forgot about it altogether. One evening I came home from college…
“They brought you some flowers,” my mother told me from the doorway.
“What flowers?” I was surprised.
“Well, look on the balcony.”
I went in — sure enough, a bouquet of flowers. Gorgeous burgundy roses, more than a meter long - I have never seen such a beautiful and huge bouquet in my life.
- Mom, how many are there? - I tried to count the roses myself a couple of times, but each time I lost count.
- It's strange, but exactly one hundred...
It's really strange... an even number... What could that mean?
But they bring an even number of flowers to funerals! - a not very pleasant guess suddenly struck me. Italian mafiosi send a parcel with dead fish as a warning, in the movie "The Godfather" they even put severed horse heads in the victims' beds, and for me, a wreath... ugh, a bouquet. And who have I already crossed?! Who... Oh, right - Baymicro! But he can easily afford to send such a bouquet, it won't hurt him. Yeah, Seryozha got in the way. I need to urgently find the money, close our issue and apologize. If Baymicro sends flowers that cost more than I owe him, it's scary to even imagine what could happen next.
- Mom, who brought them?
- A guy in uniform - said he was a courier, asked me to sign.
- And where is the packaging from him? The paper, the invoice?
— Son, you ask such questions... If only I knew what an invoice was.
— Well, a waybill with a description of the goods, their cost, the sender's address...
— I threw away the packaging, but there was definitely no invoice. Just some kind of card.
— What card? Give it to me quickly!
I take it and read: With best regards, flowers.com.
Thank God, I feel better. After all, I ordered these flowers on someone else's credit card three weeks ago and had already managed to forget about it. And the store fulfilled the order, apparently they got a good card. And why an even number of flowers? Only Russians have a division: even - for funerals, odd - for all other occasions, foreigners don't have this.
That same year, we "dug up" a Korean web shop digital-digital.com, which sold DVB cards for connecting to satellite Internet, and in a few months we completely ruined it.
At the end of the year, some stupid Germans showed up - fototechnika.de, I think. They sent us digital cameras for 68 thousand Deutschmarks, and when they realized that they had been deceived, they immediately contacted the police. Through Interpol, everything reached the KGB, the Presidential Administration, the police, and in 2001, immediately after the adoption of the new Criminal Code, raids began. They took people both based on statements from droppers and based on the results of surveillance and wiretapping of customs and couriers' phones. In an unequal struggle, about thirty carders fell, several dozen criminal cases were opened against each (one parcel - one case). Everyone was shaking. The first sentence in the carding case was handed down by the Oktyabrsky Court of Minsk on June 7, 2001. The first people convicted under Article 212 (theft using computer equipment) appeared in the country - the Makeyev brothers. They were convicted on the fact that "billing is equal to shipping", that is, it was immediately clear that they did not pay themselves. Now they are “loading” me under the same article. The punishment is from six to fifteen. They are completely crazy – they give less for murder!
Valid Agayev, who had been listening attentively until then, looked at me with sympathy.
“And is this topic still relevant now?” he asked. “I have many Chechens all over the world – in London, Canada, the USA…”
— You have to try, Walid. I don’t even know now. In 2002, shops stopped sending goods to an address different from the billing address, and convincing the store that you decided to give a gift to a nephew in another country was very difficult. Of course, you could open online access to the credit card (this is called enroll) and through the bank’s website change the billing address (the address to which banks send cardholders statements on their cards) to the address of your drop in the same States, and also register a phone number that the online store can call and ask clarifying questions about your order — in short, a lot of hassle.
— What if you specify some always busy number there? — my interlocutor showed ingenuity.
— A good idea. That’s what I did — I specified the phone numbers of Internet providers’ modem pools, the shop thought that a fax was answering, tried to get through for several days and eventually fulfilled the order — after all, the store also needs to live on something. Later, professional "calling" services appeared, for example the well-known www.callservice.biz - they called shops, banks, online casinos and all sorts of other offices with a female or male voice. By the way, they are also sitting now.
- Yes, everyone in your country is sitting, - Walid concluded joylessly.
- Well, I wouldn't say so. Until 1999, the Belarusian Criminal Code did not have any articles under which one could prosecute for karting, and the cooperation of our police with Interpol, Europol, the US Secret Service, the FBI Cybercrime Unit (IC3) and the US Postal Inspection Service was organized very poorly. True, with the adoption of the relevant articles of the Criminal Code, a regulatory framework appeared and the Belarusian Department "K" quickly made up for lost time.
- Sergey, the only thing I didn't understand from the whole story was where you get other people's credit cards?
— It’s simple: some online store is hacked, their customer base is stolen, and all the information on orders with credit card details is taken away.
— Does this mean that you can’t buy anything on the Internet at all? Otherwise, they’ll steal my credit card too…
— There is a risk, of course. Therefore, make purchases only in large online stores — they are much more difficult to hack and steal the customer base with all the card numbers. Or better yet, get a separate card for online transactions, for example, VISA Electron or Maestro, and only load the amount necessary for a specific purchase onto this “suicide” card.

Chapter 20
The World of Sharp Angles, or Rules for Life in Prison
This is a world not of angels, but of sharp angles, where people talk about moral principles, but act according to the principles of force; a world where we are always highly moral, and our enemies are always immoral.
Saul Alinsky
I had been in prison for three months already. During this time I had changed two huts, and periodically they would put "brood hens" next to me, some of whom, for some unknown reason, would confess to me their mission and tell me what exactly the cops wanted to know. These confessions always seemed unexpected, but one must not forget for a minute that in prison even the walls have ears.
Our life was distinguished by its rare monotony. In the morning, after breakfast, we would go for a walk in the prison yard. However, it was only a stretch to call it a yard - the largest of them was no larger than the living room in a typical Soviet apartment, and the smallest was no larger than an elevator. A thick metal grate with a net thrown over it, placed on brick partitions, divided the sky into equal squares, and this checkered sky, as well as the silhouettes of the guards frozen above, created a feeling of melancholy and doom.
From time to time we watched TV. When he got bored, we played cards for fun. The most popular games were "rams", "thousand", "fool" and preference. The cops brought playing cards for a small fee, or we made them ourselves. For playing cards you could end up in a punishment cell, but that didn't scare anyone. Officially, only chess, checkers, dominoes and backgammon were allowed.
- Just look at this contingent, - lamented the Chechen Valid, looking at the inhabitants of our cell. - People your age and younger do not know who Hitler and Stalin were, they say about Lenin: "I think there was such a tsar", they do not know the date of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War and who wrote "Eugene Onegin", but without hesitation they can list twenty brands of "good inexpensive" wine and ten types of drugs that they have tried. Listen to how they say: instead of trousers - "brooks", instead of corridor - "kalidor", their instep is "stupinator". And also "kardon", "quantuz", "intrigant", "halimony glasses" and, this is a hit, a Nokia phone. And they are sure that this is how it should be. Or take the same religion - when they were free, they did not even think about God. And now their hands are covered in blood up to the elbows, but they hang five icons and crosses on themselves, a whole iconostasis. Looking at how they believe in God, you just want to believe in the devil. So don’t look for friends in prison, 99% of our cellmates are wolves in sheep’s clothing, hypocrites and opportunists. Ask any seasoned prisoner what the main rule is that helps you survive in prison, and he will answer: “Don’t trust, don’t be afraid, don’t ask.” That’s all true, but I would add to that: “Don’t chatter, don’t interfere and don’t rush.” Understand, this is a cell system, and you have to have nerves of steel to be friendly with one person every day. You must think before you say anything. It’s better to keep quiet and seem like a fool than to open your mouth and finally dispel doubts. Speak little and strictly to the point, then your every word will be capacious and will be listened to. Knowing how to listen is much more important than knowing how to speak. If it were not so, Allah would not have given us two ears and one mouth. Too many people think with their mouths instead of listening and asking questions. Do not reveal your plans to anyone, otherwise it often happens that they will tell you in prison something like “everything has been decided in court, I will go home tomorrow”, and then they will wonder for a long time why the judge was changed... Do not make hasty promises, the surest way to keep your word is not to give it. Do not insult or humiliate anyone, even those who are lower in status than you. Be especially careful when expressing sarcasm - the momentary satisfaction received from caustic words can be crossed out by the price you will pay for them. Speaking without thinking is like shooting without aiming. Develop the ability to treat everything with detachment. Do not allow yourself to be hurt under any circumstances. I saw grown men cry when their cellmates, noticing how dependent they were on letters from home, wrote them letters supposedly from their wives, saying that they needed to separate. And forty-year-old men cried, can you imagine?
- Cruel, of course, - I imagined myself in the place of the recipient of such a "letter".
— What if a woman really writes something like that, then what — should I hang myself? — my friend continued. — Listen to a joke I just remembered. A soldier gets a letter from his girlfriend. She writes that she has met someone else and asks him to return her photo. The saddened soldier collects all the unnecessary photos of women from the entire platoon and sends them with a note: “Darling, unfortunately I can’t remember which of them is you. Please take your photo and return the others.” That’s how you should act. Become a slippery ball that is impossible to hold: don’t show your sore spots and weaknesses to anyone. Stop any attempts to talk about intimate topics, because behind bars there are enough smart guys who start an innocent, at first glance, conversation about how each of us is with his wife, and then drive you into a “harem”. In Russia, more than 40% of convicts have been subjected to sexual violence in places of detention. Be as inconspicuous as possible in the cell. If you don't know what to do in a given situation, it's better to ask more experienced inmates. If there aren't any in your cell, write to the central - there are people everywhere. Avoid conflict situations, try to respect yourself, those around you, and the established life and order in the cell. Never interfere in someone else's game of chance - neither with advice, nor with corrections, nor even if you notice that one of the players is cheating. Don't get into prison disputes. The only way to win an argument is not to get involved in it. And lastly, Seryoga: never take someone else's things without asking permission first. You'll figure out the rest yourself, the main thing is not to be afraid of anything and be yourself.
* *
Katya got into a really bad situation: it turned out that Grisha, the same jerk who was with me in the temporary detention facility and whom I asked to call Katya, gained her trust and, under the guise of his relative working for Volodarka and being able to give me a mobile phone, “conned” her out of $3,000. When, a week later, I still hadn’t gotten in touch and Katya demanded that this scoundrel return the money and phone, Bad Dude planted five grams of “weed” in her car and called the appropriate authorities.
“So, how are you doing?” the nondescript red-haired investigator Radnenok, who had once replaced Makarevich, began from afar.
“Badly, but I’ve gotten used to it. What do I owe you for that?
” “Still keeping quiet?
” “Of course.
” “And it turns out that your Katya is a drug addict...”
“What do you mean?!” I tried my best to give my face a surprised expression, although I had learned about what had happened from a lawyer the day before and was aware that the issue was already being resolved.
- Yes, yes, they found drugs on her, - Radnenok sneered. - But we could have helped her, but you don’t want to tell us anything…
- Help yourself, - I said through my teeth and exhaled a cloud of thick cigarette smoke into the investigator’s face. - God is not a sucker - he sees everything!
A criminal case was opened against Katerina under Article 328 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, which, by the way, provided for two to five years of imprisonment, she was kept in a temporary detention facility for a couple of days, and if it were not for the connections of our friends and her complete innocence, the case could have ended very badly. It took a lot of effort to stop this case and get it opened against the person who planted the drugs on her.

Chapter 21
New Year
The investigation of my case was proceeding as usual. Katerina constantly supported me, sometimes sending several letters a day. She also took on the entire organization of packages for me and all the work with lawyers. The investigator granted us a two-hour meeting, during which she first said that we could get married, but neither she nor I wanted to do this while I was in the pretrial detention facility. It was decided to wait for a little certainty, and only then think about marriage.
My mother, meanwhile, was trying to get a divorce from her alcoholic husband, but he was desperately resisting and wouldn’t give her a divorce.
“Who the hell is this Novikov?” Makarevich asked one day during our next meeting.
“What Novikov?!” I didn’t immediately realize who they were talking about.
“Yes, your stepfather.
” “Oh, that retarded one… What happened?”
“Yes, he called me once, about a week after your arrest. He found me himself – I don’t know him. He introduced himself and said that he could provide some evidence against you and all that. I sent an operative group to him, they came to your place outside the city – a long way off, and this Novikov was drunk, he could barely speak. He slipped my operatives some kind of diskette “with traces of your crimes.” Demagnetized, as it turned out later at the department.
“Yes, a rare scumbag. He ruined my mother's whole life, and now
he's trying to ruin mine... - He who seeks will find, - Makarevich said, for some unknown reason.
- What are you talking about?
- Sooner or later, everyone finds their own. He was the one who turned you in to the Chekists...
- What?! - I couldn't believe my ears.
- Well, how do you think we found you? Batyuk and Voropayev paid... No, it's better to put it another way: your case was suspended because you went into hiding and were put on the wanted list, and it was kept in the furthest safe. You return from Ukraine, hang out in Minsk for six months, constantly in sight - clubs and restaurants, and only six months later they take you. Have you ever wondered why this is? But we found out about your return to Belarus almost immediately.
The more Makarevich told me, the more clearly the game of solitaire from seemingly insignificant but inevitable events that eventually led to my arrest took shape in my head.
“And you wouldn’t be sitting here now if your stepfather hadn’t gone to the KGB and snitched on the fact that you, while being wanted by all sorts of people, are living peacefully in Minsk and not hiding from anyone,” the investigator continued.
Yeah, that explains why there was a KGB agent present with the cops when I was arrested, I added another piece to the puzzle.
Why did he do this to you? Makarevich's more rhetorical question distracted me from my thoughts.
Why... But really, WHAT?! I couldn't find a logical answer to that question, but I said out loud:
Novikov saw the source of all his problems and quarrels with my mother not in his endless drinking bouts and physical abuse, but in me. Like I was turning my mother against him. He's a damn schizophrenic. He served in the army in intelligence. In the Far East. That's where he became an alcoholic.
So how can I explain that less than a week after my conversation with Makar, my would-be dad changed his residence registration to the literal neighboring apartment? Having never had the slightest problem with the law in his fifties, he went to jail for murder. Well, as I already said, God is not a sucker...
- Let's take him to our place, - I tried to persuade Phil. - Talk to the cops, I'll pay you five "sheets". And then we'll see what to do with him.
Filonov made an appointment with an operative.
- It won't work, Gray, to take him from us, - he told me an hour later. - Apparently, fearing retribution for his sins, your stepfather wrote a statement to the head of the prison right from the door, asking under no circumstances to transfer him to you.
Too bad.
For the murder of a man, Novikov received only nine years, of which he served only four and a half.
The cops, wanting to deprive me of the slightest opportunity to "break loose", divided the case into separate proceedings: the episodes of shopping with Pasha and Styopa - in one, and everything related to the sale of dumps - in another, which assumed the issuance of two sentences with subsequent addition of terms. Perhaps there was another reason for this, since Vova Boyankov, who had once been my accomplice but somehow suspiciously quickly became just a witness, came to see my mother and offered to resolve the issue of terminating my second case for a bribe of $30-40 thousand. My mother, warned by me about similar situations and taught by the bitter story that happened to Katya, recorded all his offers on a dictaphone and rejected them. Whether this was Bayan’s attempt to make a quick buck or whether he was acting in collusion with the cops from Department “K” remained behind the scenes.
On New Year’s Eve, December 31, Andrei Filonov called me aside with the air of a conspirator.
“Want to smoke?” he asked me.
“Thanks, I have some,” I took a pack of red Marlboros out of my pocket.
“Not cigarettes, let’s smoke some weed, I came in today,” Phil unclenched his fist and showed me a few buds. - Have you tried skank, Dutch?
- No, damn it, I was born in the forest. Listen, where is it from?
- Getting any drugs in prison is not a problem, if you have money.
- When will we? - I lowered my voice to a whisper.
- Even now.
- Maybe later - suddenly they'll drag me to the offices again? - I don't know why I resisted.
- Don't worry, it's six in the evening now, who's coming to see you? The lawyer was already here today...
- Okay, - I let myself be persuaded.
The preparations took about an hour. Phil got out a smoking pipe, a special brush and began to clean it from tobacco resin. I took a thimble - all black with carbon, soaked with a characteristic smell - apparently, they had smoked through it more than once, a needle and began to clean the holes in the thimble. Then we hung large towels around our cell - four bunks at the far end of the hut, near the window where we slept, a group gathered - me, Baton, Phil, Slavik the burglar, a couple of normal guys...
- Valid, are you with us?
- Thank you, guys, I'm not here for this kind of business. I still have prayer today. And oranges and vodka would be nice, I'd rather have alcohol, - the Chechen confidently refused.
- Well, as you wish, join us if you want. There's plenty of weed, - said Dima Baton.
- So, guys, - Phil began his parting speech. - The weed is killer - please don't go overboard with it. Many before you thought that they'd tried everything in this life, you ask him: "Have you smoked before?" And he says: "Since childhood, it doesn't even affect me anymore" - and then two "smoke", a couple of questions, and he's ready to name the numbers of all his accounts with millions or break out of the house. In this business, it's better to underdo it than to overdo it. Take a drag - wait two minutes, skip a circle, feel the "rush". Everyone should be in approximately the same emotional state, otherwise we won't understand the joke and each other. If it's not enough, we'll catch up later.
- Bro, maybe that's enough? - Baton stopped Phil. — Everyone here smoked, — he waved his hand at those gathered, — and, as I understand it, — he looked closely at each one individually, — not painters, but artists.
And off we go. One drag — another — let's take a break, boys. Well, did everyone get into it? Yeah, that's what we needed. She's a good devil! Jokes, funny and not so funny stories from life.
We chatted, laughed. We remembered our free life. We repeated them. I was so "covered" that I could hardly pronounce the word "mom", let alone get up from my bunk.
A knock on the "feeding trough".
— Guys, who's there? — Dima Baton shouted to the far end of the hut.
— Pavlovich, — was heard a few minutes later.
— Damn it, Seryy, you, — said Dima. — Go to the offices.
— Damn it! I felt like I shouldn't smoke.
— The main thing is, don't get too worked up, — Phil advised me. - Nothing terrible happened. Act natural. If she's a lawyer, she won't even notice.
- I'll try.
- Good luck.
I changed my clothes with difficulty, took some documents on the case, a pen, something else.
- Well, are you ready? - I heard from behind the door.
- Wait a minute, senior. Two minutes, - I was stalling for time.
- Seryi, go wash your face with cold water, - Valid came up to me. - It will let up.
They led me out the door. My legs were weak, they didn’t want to walk, every movement was difficult. And a swarm of thoughts in my head: who could it be? A lawyer? But she was already there. An investigator? Unlikely, it’s the 31st, evening - he’s probably already at home, slicing Olivier salad. Okay, let’s get to those offices first, and then we’ll figure it out. “Don’t worry, Seryozha, act natural,” I repeated to myself the whole way.
The prison seemed to be deserted. At this time it was already dark, only the duty “night” lighting was on in the corridors, and all the prisoners were most likely getting ready to celebrate the New Year - every now and then, from behind the doors, to which we sometimes came too close, friendly laughter was heard. The fourth floor, the third, the second, the first, the second again - everything is so slow and long - the way to Golgotha must have been shorter.
- Senior, what's the office number? - I ask the controller, hoping to get a hint: the even side was for lawyers, the odd - for investigators.
The senior is silent. Like a fish on ice. Maybe he's deaf? My heart is pounding so hard that it feels like it's going to break against the inside of my ribs. They lead me into a "glass" one meter by one meter, where usually after the lawyers and investigators leave you wait to be taken back to the hut.
- Hey, senior, tell me the office number? - I frantically knock on the door of the "glass".
- Just wait, they'll call me now, - came a displeased answer.
Where will they call me, who will call me? Again a swarm of buzzing thought-bees. So-so-so... If I were a lawyer, they would have taken me straight to the office. If the investigator is the same picture. So, not them. Then who?! And then it dawns on me - "godfather"! What does he want from me? Apparently, some b*tch has already given up that we smoked weed... Yes, exactly, "godfather". What will he ask?! A whirlpool of possible questions and answers swirled in my head: if he asks this, I will answer this way, and if he asks that, I will answer differently. Oh, mommies, why am I so unlucky? Why did I smoke?! I hope they don't get me wrong, the last thing I need is "three hundred twenty-eighth"... What if this was all deliberately stirred up in the cell? Katya wrote to me: "You can't trust anyone in prison", and Valid said the same thing... And how can I look her and my mother in the eye then?! Damn, why did I smoke?!
The clank of a lock. - Pavlovich, get out. - Where to? - Straight down the corridor.
I have never been to this part of the prison. A long corridor of about ten meters and rectangles of equally unfriendly doors covered with black leatherette on both sides. Like in the OGPU, or whatever it’s called, the NKVD, you don’t know when you’ll get home…
I walk carefully, measuring every step – try to guess which door they’re waiting for you behind. I lowered my eyes to the floor so that no one would “buy” me out for being high. Suddenly, the third door on the right smoothly opened.
– Come in.
A table that used to be varnished. A chair. Half-light, no overhead lighting. And two cops – a fat captain with a shiny face and a snotty lieutenant of about twenty-three.
- Have a seat, - the captain pointed to a shabby chair.
The lamp was right in my face. A table lamp. Damn, they'll definitely "buy" me out for being stoned to bits. If it weren't for the lamp, it would be okay. But otherwise...
- How are you, Sergey? - the captain began.
- F-fine, - I try to strengthen my voice and cope with my excitement.
- Can you guess why I called?
- No way (I can guess, of course, because they ratted me out. No, why was I smoking?..).
- The prosecutor's office sent me a request, I have to interrogate you, - the captain began to lift the curtain of secrecy. - Did you bribe the traffic cops?
- What bribe?!
- I don't care, I'm not an investigator. I'll interrogate you and send you the answers, and the prosecutor will decide whether to open a criminal case.
- Okay, I'm ready, go ahead.
— …on the date of this year, when you were stopped on the Minsk-Gomel highway, you walked into a service car of the traffic police officers… What did they look like?.. Who exactly?..
Damn, while he’s asking, I’ve already forgotten the beginning of the question. The weed won’t let me go. It’s a killer.
— Let me read it myself, — trying to snatch the sheets of paper with questions from the operative.
— Hey, stop! — the godfather protested. — You can’t read this. I’m the one who’s supposed to ask you these questions.
— Come on, but hurry up — New Year’s is coming soon, I’m tired after a day with these investigators, lawyers, and now with the prosecutors too.
— Okay, go. They’ll let you know from the prosecutor’s office if they open a case. Maybe you’ll get away with it. I didn’t see anything particularly criminal here.
— God willing.
— Is everything okay in the house? — the godfather wouldn’t let go.
— It’s okay. The house is good, the guys are too. "And anyway," I thought to myself, "I love the whole world, just let me out of here already.
" "You don't want to cooperate with me?"
"What do you mean? "
"In a literal sense," the young lieutenant joined the conversation, "to tell me everything that happens in the cell."
"I don't want to."
"Okay, go," the captain finally allowed.
Phew, that was a relief. They took me back to the hut.
"So what happened?" Phil asked.
"I was at the "godfather's," the prosecutor's office ordered him to interrogate me. Extreme, damn it. I've already remembered all the powers of heaven.
Closer to lights out, corps commander Sasha Rubin came in, who conducts the morning and evening checks to make sure everything is in place.
"Happy New Year, guys. I wish you all a speedy release.
" "Thank you. And we wish you a good time," we answered in a discordant chorus.
Simple human attention. Only eight words, but you don't expect them in these walls, and that makes it doubly warm.
- Gray, let's go get some smoke, - Slavik Beloskursky tugged me by the sleeve.
- Eh-eh-eh, no. That's enough for me, - I flatly refused. - I'd rather go with Walid for oranges.
- Well, as you wish.
I didn’t smoke anymore. We lit candles. A pine branch appeared from somewhere. A smell from childhood. And everyone probably thought that they were waiting for them at home, that there was a hearth, a family, tangerines under the tree and champagne on the tables. Children, wives, mothers and loved ones…
New Year’s in prison – there is something unnatural, wrong about it. For me it’s the first, for someone the tenth, for others – the twentieth. How many more will there be?.. It’s sad. Tears in my eyes. And through the distance you feel the warmth of those who are waiting for you at home…
In January, Valid Agayev was transferred to another cell. The reason? He openly patronized me, which Phil couldn’t have liked, as he wanted to derive some benefit for himself from communicating with me. Valid wasn’t particularly upset – he was supposed to be extradited to Russia any day now – and he periodically wrote me “notes” from another cell.
A couple of weeks later, he and Kazbek were indeed taken to Moscow, and they were in the FSB Lefortovo pretrial detention center. I called him on his mobile several times, sharing my meager news, and Valid told me about himself.
“They’re no longer blaming me for Khlebnikov’s murder,” he shouted joyfully into the phone. “They only accused me of organizing the kidnapping of Dagestani businessman Akhmed-Pasha Aliyev for ransom. I bought him off the security officers, who owed him $300,000. What? Not because I’m so kind, but because Aliyev was gone, a very large deal I was involved in could have fallen through.” Yes, everything is fine, brother, the issue is being resolved here too, and most likely, only the charge under Article 222 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (illegal acquisition, transfer, sale, storage, transportation or carrying of a weapon) will reach the court - for bringing a bag with three pistols, two grenades and cartridges to the apartment of one of his fellow countrymen, - Agayev finished on a positive note.
I still don’t know who killed Paul Klebnikov - was it Agayev and Dukuzov or someone else. However, I don’t want to know. But what I am absolutely convinced of is that until they stop killing journalists in Russia, neither Putin, nor especially Medvedev, will ever build a normal state.

Chapter 22
The Prisoner's Dilemma
I went to court with charges under Part 4 of Article 212 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, which carried a sentence of six to fifteen years' imprisonment.
Every trip to court is a serious test for the nervous system. They wake you up early - around five, but, as a rule, you yourself are already awake at this time - no joke, tomorrow there are serious tests ahead, a meeting with the unknown, as well as with relatives, so you can not close your eyes all night. You quickly wash, get dressed, try to stop shivering - either from the cold or from excitement, force yourself to have breakfast, wait for the inevitable "Pavlovich, take your things!" behind the door, a mattress in one hand (before each trip to court you hand it over to the warehouse to get it back in the evening, and excuses like "I still have twenty court hearings ahead, I'll go back to this cell" do not work), in the other - a modest plastic folder with documents on the case, and together with twenty or thirty other "lucky ones" you end up in the "sedimentation tank".
Everything in prison begins with the "sedimentation tank" and ends there. Half a pack of smoked cigarettes, a couple of hours of waiting, scant prison news (how much each person got), monotonous meaningless conversations or solving crossword puzzles. If you're really lucky, you might get caught with your accomplices.
- Hi, Pasha, - I was stunned by the surprise, having already seen Pasha Voropaev on my first trip to court.
- Hi, Seryoga, - he looked pale and haggard.
- I sent "messages" all over the central prison twice, looking for you, but in vain.
- And my apartment is not working, - explained Voropaev, - seven-six, at the end of the old building. Above us is 100th, the "business apartment", and apart from them there is no one to work with. Going through the cops is also not an option - the "message" will easily end up on the "godfather's" desk.
- Well, how are you doing in general?
- I'm used to it, - Pavel answered indifferently.
- What do you think?
- I'm afraid to even guess, and you?
- Pasha, we have an article up to "fifteen" - there's no point in us drowning each other. There's Boyankov, other characters - we'll go after them. Have you ever heard of the prisoner's dilemma?
- No, but should you have?
— Actually, it wouldn’t hurt any criminal to know. So, in 1950, Melvin Drescher and Merrill Flood discovered what’s called the prisoner’s dilemma. Here’s what it’s like: Two suspects are arrested outside a bank and held in separate cells. To get them to confess to a planned robbery, the police make them an offer. If neither one talks, both will get two years in prison. If one rats on the other and the other doesn’t, the one who rats on the other will go free and the one who doesn’t confess will get five years. If both rat on each other, both will get four years. Each knows the other has been made the same offer. What happens next? Both think, “I’m sure the other one will crack. He rats on me, I get five years, and he gets free. It’s not fair.” So both come to the same conclusion: “On the contrary, if I rat on him, I might get free. There’s no point in both of us suffering if at least one of us can get out of here.” In reality, in a similar situation, most people would give each other away. Given that the accomplice did the same, both would get four years. At the same time, if they had thought about it, they would have kept quiet and only got two years. Even stranger is the following: if you repeat the experiment and give the accomplices a chance to confer, the result remains the same. Two people, even having worked out a common strategy of behavior together, eventually betray each other.
- So what?
- What do you mean, what?! The key phrase here is: "If they had thought about it, they would have only got two years," and you and Stepan have already told off two terms. So let's at least stick to a single version in court. Deal?
- Okay, - Voropayev agreed suspiciously easily.
Around 8:00, the paddy wagons arrive. The court puts an end to any criminal case, and although no one has yet proven your guilt, you are already a priori guilty - even people far from prison, for example, those who accidentally ran over a pedestrian, are taken to court in handcuffs. Women - in front, men - in the back.
Metallic clang: "Voropayev, get out!"
- Pasha-a-a, remember what we agreed on! - I shout after him.
The paddy wagons deserve a special mention — metal “coffins” on wheels, in which prisoners are transported. Open the penitentiary regulations of any European country and you will definitely see something like this: “It is prohibited to transport prisoners in poorly ventilated and lit vehicles or in conditions that cause them unnecessary physical suffering or humiliate them.” And what do we have? A GAZ-class vehicle, or “gazelle,” without windows, is divided into three sections: the driver’s cabin, a section for guards and narrow “cups” for the separate transportation of prisoners involved in the same criminal cases, as well as a common cage — about 6 m, into which sometimes up to twenty people are crammed. Almost without light, someone’s arms — legs — heads — elbows — knees — like sardines in a can, no other way. And the handcuffs tighten even more on every bump…
They brought us to court. They took us through the back door. Another "sedimentation tank", this time smaller - for one or two people. If you're lucky and they don't move anyone in, you can while away the wait pretty well. What kind? It happens that they bring you to court at nine, and they don't get you up in the courtroom until four, and even that's not a given. It happens that they listen to you for ten minutes in the morning, and then you "freeze" until five, and you're very lucky if an escort from the neighboring district court picks you up at lunchtime. And it happens... like what happened to Baton once:
- Damn, guys, what just happened... - Dima began after returning from court.
- What?
- They brought us from court - they take us to the furthest "sedimentation tank". We "hang" there for a couple of hours, everything as usual. It's time to wake us up in our huts, but no one follows us, there's only some kind of commotion behind the door. Ten minutes later, the "brakes" opened, and behind them - everything is pitch black. From the masks.
— What the hell, masks? — businessman Borya Chunosov asked.
— Yes, a “mask show,” Baton spat angrily. — The “Almaz” special police unit. Everyone who was in the “sedimentation area” was put through the gauntlet of their truncheons.
— What’s going on?! They’re beating people up for no reason at all, in broad daylight, — I was perplexed. —
It’s the 21st century after all… — It’s the 21st century everywhere else in the world, but here it’s Belo-rus-sia, — Dima, a Russian by nationality, pronounced syllable by syllable. — The Morozov gang, an organized crime group from Gomel, is going to be tried soon, there are about fifty defendants there. They’ll be tried right in the pretrial detention center. The cops said that they’re building a huge cage in the assembly hall. So “Almaz” is practicing — on the site, so to speak, of future events.
— Yeah, damn it…
For two weeks after that, the entire Central was beaten up day after day. They came in during the miscalculations, mostly in the evening - the slightest whisper or, God forbid, a sidelong glance in their direction - and the whole hut was slaughtered to the point of blood. Just like that. Who else to train cruelty on, if not on disenfranchised prisoners?..
Another time, Baton was brought to court — an article from three to twelve. A claim for $300 thousand and three young children. "Do you plead guilty?" — "No." — "I ask that a sentence of twelve years' imprisonment with confiscation of property be imposed." The verdict is in a month. Before it — a sleepless night, and not just one. In the morning they ordered with things. A quick breakfast, a pack of strong Marlboros, a "sediment tank", waiting. An hour, two, three. Everyone had already been taken away. "Hey, what about me?" — "Wait, they'll come for you too." He waits. Until five in the evening. They took him to the hut.
— Dimon, how much did you bring?
— None.
— Where have you been hanging around all day?
— I spent the whole time at the "assembly", they didn't even take me to the court.
— Yeah... Maybe it was for the best, they would have given me a "ten."
— Don't even talk about it.
— When's the next time?
— In a month again.
— Hang in there, bro.
After a month of agonizing waiting, Baton was finally brought to court. Again a "sedation tank", this time in court, waiting... They never brought him into the courtroom.
— Dima, so what?
— It's okay, it all happened again. I spent a day in the "glass". They should have at least spared the children.
— These ones will spare them, of course...
And only three months later, when his nerves were finally giving way, Baton was sentenced - eight. Strict. With confiscation. And three young children...
When you go to court for the first time in your life, you feel uneasy at the thought of how your friends, family and loved ones will look at you. Ashamed, somehow, and uncomfortable. And your whole body trembles from excitement.
They lead you into the courtroom: a cage, guards, government furniture, bright daylight, which you have already managed to get used to, family and close friends. Everyone's looks are warm, affectionate, sympathetic - not a single one condemning, I worried in vain. You sit like an animal in a cage, and there's no one to help you - even your lawyer is sitting God knows where, although even in Russia, your defense attorney is right next to you and can prompt and advise.
"Pasha-a-a, remember what we agreed on!" - But he still says the same thing as before. Drescher and Flood were right. I was the "locomotive" in the trial - that is, the main defendant in the case. The prosecutor did not see evidence for some of the episodes brought and reclassified the charge to Part 3 of Article 212 (from three to ten). Well, thank God - it's easier now. Request: Batyuk and Voropayev - three years, Pavlovich, as the organizer - three and a half. Excellent! The verdict is the next day. A sleepless night, red eyes, coffee, cigarettes, nerves are shot to hell. The judge reads out deliberately slowly: “To sentence… Batyuk and Voropaev… in the form of three years… of RESTRICTION of freedom… Pavlovich… in the form of five years… of IMPRISONMENT with serving the sentence in a high-security penal colony… to apply to Pavlovich… an additional punishment in the form of confiscation of property…”

Chapter 23
Compromise
— What’s going on? — I asked my lawyer the next morning. — Why did they give me so much?! After asking for three and a half, I expected three, well, three and a half at most. And here they gave me five!.. They gave me more than the prosecutor’s office asked for... What is this anyway?
— Sergey, listen. Of course, you can hire another lawyer, that’s normal. But I did everything I could, — Nesterovich justified herself. — Understand, if they had given you three, there would have most likely been a prosecutor’s protest, a change in the composition of the court, and an eight-year sentence. But they gave me more than the state prosecutor asked for, which means there are no grounds for a protest.
I didn’t know how much of her words were true and how much were fiction, but I must admit there was a certain logic.
— Okay, let’s keep working. Don’t change horses in midstream, — I changed my anger to mercy.
When the cops were detained, they stole everything that was in my car: Chanel glasses, an LED flashlight, Trussardi Python eau de toilette, discount cards to the best restaurants in town, a Mercedes door handle, and Etro pants, all worth about $2,000 — a thousand — a thousand — probably the sight of the expensive things surrounding me really struck their meager imagination, so much so that they didn’t even stop at stealing a half-empty bottle of perfume. In addition, my laptop contained about two hundred dumps with PIN codes and about $3,000 in Webmoney and e-gold. Where is it all now? God only knows — our laptops, worth $3,000 each, were destroyed by court order…
A week later, an amnesty was issued, and my sentence was reduced by a year.
The investigation of the second case against me, concerning the sale of dumps and the activities of my DumpsMarket forum, was immediately resumed. Investigator Makarevich, acting within his authority, offered me a compromise: depending on certain circumstances, dump trading could be classified under either Article 212 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus or the much milder Article 222 (from three to ten years).
“In short, listen to my proposal,” Makar began without preamble. “We have your laptops. You know perfectly well what’s in them. Full proof of your guilt is only a matter of time. But I don’t want to reread tens of thousands of pages of your correspondence with clients, send out numerous requests for legal assistance to different countries and form a solid evidence base. I’m no longer interested
in your case — you already have a “five” in your pocket. “Okay, what exactly is the proposal?
” “I can fit your actions under Article 222 — aiding and abetting in the production of counterfeit credit cards, it’s from three to ten years, are you interested?”
— You ask!..
— In addition, in the accompanying note to the prosecutor, I will indicate that you provided invaluable assistance to the investigation, led to the trail of an entire criminal syndicate, and I will ask to apply Article 69 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus — you will not be given more than five. Agree.
— Aleksandr Valerievich, but Article 69 assumes that I should give up my accomplices…
— Do you have any?! It seems like you were the only one working — have you gotten smarter, or something, after the last “deal”… Anyway, think about it, I’m not rushing you. Consult with your lawyer, she’s an experienced woman, and if so, I’ll prepare a list of questions, you’ll think about the answers for a week, then you’ll fully admit your guilt, I’ll conduct a single interrogation, a couple of formal examinations and close the case.
— Okay, I’ll think about it.
I looked out the window. It was spring 2005, I was in high spirits, and the investigator’s offer was more than tempting.
— So what do you think about all this? — the lawyer asked after Makarevich left.
— Very tempting. But risky — what if he deceives me? You yourself told me: "You can't trust the cops - 99 times out of 100 they're bluffing."
- I remember telling you. But this is a little different. The investigator has shown his hand. You do understand that if you refuse, he'll still collect evidence of your guilt, right? I think we can take a risk.
That's what we did. True, since Makarevich didn't give any tangible guarantees other than his word, I had to be pretty nervous in the period between giving a confession and the presentation of the final charges.
- Now let's consider the legal side of Makarevich's proposal, - suggested Galina Arkadyevna after I told the investigator that I was ready to admit guilt. - What's the difference between 212 and 222?
— Well, look: if I simply sold a ready-made card or a dump, then this is the production of counterfeit payment cards, and if I took this credit card and bought something in a store or withdrew from an ATM, then this is already theft using computer equipment, Article 212.
— And what did you actually do with the dumps?
— Sold them.
— For what?
— What do you mean, for what?! My clients took dumps, wrote them down on plastic, distributed the ready-made cards to their mules, and they bought up the goods in stores all over the world.
— So you knew that the buyers of your dumps would eventually use them to steal goods from stores?
— Of course, I knew.
— No, my dear, you “didn’t know.”
— ?..
— Very simple, — seeing that I wasn’t “getting it,” Galina Arkadyevna began to explain. - If you knew that your dumps would be used to commit thefts, then you will still have 212 - as aiding and abetting theft by using computer equipment. And if not the investigator, then the prosecutor will definitely reclassify it in court. So what do you say during interrogation?
— Well, something like: “I sold dumps over the Internet. I knew that my customers, in turn, resold them further in smaller batches. It’s a peculiar business. I didn’t even imagine that the dumps I sold would be written onto plastic cards and used to make purchases in stores, since making cards requires expensive equipment, which my customers — as far as I know from what they said — did not have. I was confident that the dumps were purchased from me for the purpose of further resale.”
— That’s smart — you have Article 222. Now let’s get back to the text of the indictment. Explain to me in your own words what you are accused of.
— I made twenty pieces of white “plastic” with PIN codes and gave them to Saprykin — but that’s nonsense, I’ll prove in court that Ilya Saprykin is brazenly lying. And if this idiot insists on his own, I’ll drag him along with me. They also accuse him of creating the DumpsMarket Internet forum, where people who stole money from other people's credit cards communicated, and of selling dumps without "pins" through the forum, which caused damage to the US economy in the amount of more than $15 million.
- Is it true that you created DumpsMarket?
- Yes, Makarevich did not take away or add anything here.
- When did you create it?
When?..
* *
The fall of 2003 found me in Kiev. Dumps, as well as money, were constantly available. Of course, sometimes there were interruptions with dumps from certain countries, and then they had to be bought from Gabrik, Auger (who changed his nickname to Twilight) and KLYKVA. They were all serious adults, I could influence Gabrik's pricing policy through Scorpo, Nicron's brother, and with KLYKVA, as with other Boa Factory participants, I never had any problems at all.
It should be noted that at that time the dump trading sphere on all carding forums was de facto monopolized by their owners, and attracting new buyers was becoming a problem. That's when I came up with the idea of creating my own forum, which I called DumpsMarket. At first it was hosted in the .com and .net domain zones, but competitors sent out millions of spam messages like:
"Welcome to dumpsmarket.com - a site with stolen credit cards, child pornography, fake documents and complete information about all US citizens!
You can find fresh stolen dumps here: link
Credit cards with CVV2 here: link
SSN number database here: link
Contact: panther[757] ICQ 440 07777".
The recipients of these letters complained to anti-spam agencies, and I had to quickly register domains in the .cn and .ws zones. I confess that sometimes I also used this proven method of eliminating competitors and once destroyed the BadB.biz website (Vladik, forgive me).
Ironically, the creation of DumpsMarket coincided with the black date for America, September 11.
- Where did you get the dumps? - Galina Arkadyevna distracted me from my memories.
- Trading in dumps, like any other product, is possible in two fundamentally different directions: when you sell your own - that is, you are a seller (from the English sell - "to sell"), and reselling - when you resell someone else's. Most dump traders were resellers. Hackers who obtained dumps rarely sold them themselves, preferring to give them to some reseller with a popular name for sale.
Dumps were obtained exclusively by Russian hackers - Skorpo, nCux, Nikron, ViperSS and Aizek[797].
- How did they get them? Hack some sites?
— Hacking anything is hacking, the hardest part is finding what to hack. It’s quite hard to hack a merchant, and there’s no guarantee that it will contain dumps and not just plain “cardboard”. Processing centers are an even harder target. But there are a ton of POS terminals, and they’re poorly protected — that’s what you need to look for. Ideally, you’d find a payment processing center for some retail or hotel chain.
— Were you a seller or a reseller?
— When I sold our database with Nikron, I was a seller, of course. When I didn’t have my own dumps, I had to sell someone else’s.
— And have you ever hacked anything yourself?
— No. I didn’t have the qualifications. I found places where there were dumps and gave them over to the professionals to tear apart. They would get the databases, we would sort them by country and “bins” together and throw them on the market. The first two or three months of working with a new supplier always went smoothly, but then the guys got a taste of big money, their requests changed, their needs grew, new wholesale buyers of dumps appeared, and the price tag for dumps, including for me, was constantly increasing. Every day it was harder to get my partners to return to work, which was usually replaced by girls, alcohol and drugs. I had to hang around online for days, waiting for them, or look for new hackers.
- So, if I understood correctly, you didn’t hack banks yourself, and all they can charge you with is selling the details of stolen cards?
- Yes, that’s right. And it doesn’t matter to me what to sell: dumps, “cardboard”, passports, condoms, tractors... Excluding child porn and drugs. Dumps, of course, are the most profitable - a few digits, but they cost hundreds of bucks.
- How many competitors did you have?
— The only ones who were serious were Script, BadB, Tron, diE, Gabrik and KLYKVA.
— How much did you earn selling dumps? — the question about my income seemed to keep my lawyer awake at night.
— The profitability of sales was from 100 to 500%, — I still avoided a direct answer, — and it depended heavily on the quality of the tracks and the pickiness of the buyers. Any base consisted of American dumps by about eighty percent.
— Have you encountered Russian dumps?
— Very rarely — we never touched residents of the former USSR on principle. Why? It was a pity. In America, all bank accounts are insured, but here the card owner would be dragged around by the police, everyone would suspect that he stole from himself and now wants to return it. There are enough bourgeois for our time. A manifestation of patriotism, or something. I don’t remember where this rule came from, but all carders strictly observed it — they didn’t touch their own.
— How many dumps did you usually sell per month?
— Five to ten thousand. Hackers often got their hands on gigantic arrays of information — our database with Nikron alone contained more than a million tracks. True, in order not to “drop” prices, we had to act according to the principle “If there are only four people left on the planet, you need to sell enough dumps to be enough for only two.”
— How did the buyers pay?
— Via WebMoney, e-gold, bank transfer or Western Union. More often, of course, via Western.
— What else was sold on DumpsMarket?
— Documents — driver's licenses, ID cards, passports — all produced by the same printing house whose services Boa once used. A set of a passport, license and internal ID, for example, of France, cost me only 150 euros.
— And the quality?
— Quite high. However, none of these passports gave the right to reside in the country indicated in the passport — because the passports, as you understand, were issued not by the state, but by DumpsMarket, that is, they were well-printed fakes.
When creating DumpsMarket, I tried to combine the best of carder.org, Boa Factory and Carder Planet — eye-catching design, multilingual interface, easy navigation and strict selection of moderators. In addition, I added my own "tricks" - search by "bin", track1 generator from track2, a selection of the best security programs and articles on each direction of carding from recognized authorities in their field.
In promoting the forum, I used everything that my intuition told me: selling dumps in packages at a fixed price, discounts and bonuses, used word of mouth and established cooperation with Chinese "plastic" manufacturers - when ordering dumps from me, the client received a huge discount on the best counterfeit "plastic" in the world.
Since most of the foreign visitors to DumpsMarket were Chinese, it was quite logical to create a Chinese-language section on the forum. God knows what they wrote there, but I appointed a person I trusted, Michael Chung Ho, as the moderator of the Chinese section. He and his wife Lam, nicknamed Candy, led a transnational criminal group that used counterfeit bank cards to shop around the world and had direct links to the Triad.
Michael's fatal mistake was that he kept a flash drive with traces of crimes on him - dumps, supplier contacts and other dodgy information should be stored on a remote server, access to which is recorded only in your head. In addition, he saved ICQ correspondence (instead of using web-ICQ) and communicated on criminal topics via SMS.
My mistake was that I told him my real name, contact information and even my bank account number. In addition, it is definitely not worth keeping and using laptops and phones stolen with plastic cards at home - they all have a serial number, and this is already a weighty piece of evidence.
At times I felt lonely - I devoted myself entirely to work, smoked two packs of strong Marlboro, gained ten extra kilos, and the specific nature of my activities did not imply an active search for new friends. I did not strive to meet new women either. It is not surprising that at that time I slept mostly with expensive whores - high income allowed me to have the best of them.

Chapter 24
God, save me from friends
Be careful with friends - they are more likely to betray, because they are easily envied.
R. Green, American writer
In the spring of 2004, Auger left the wholesale dumps market, very few tracks remained in Gabrik's databases. Periodically, there were interruptions in satisfying the ever-growing demand of DumpsMarket users for high-quality and affordable dumps. The only one who did not encounter this problem was the ubiquitous BadB, who found a virtually inexhaustible source of fresh dumps. Understandably, Vladik was in no hurry to share his supplier's contacts with me, but after a couple of days of intensive searching, I myself managed to find out that the owner of the new database is the well-known carder.org native JonnyHell.
Johnny's database, according to him, was from Wal-Mart, contained more than a million dumps, and information about this leak is still hidden. And can you imagine what a blow to Wal-Mart's reputation would have been? Just one video posted on YouTube by an angry United Airlines passenger reduced the company's capitalization by $180 million. The reluctance to receive negative publicity is the most common reason why organizations that have been attacked conduct their own investigation or do everything possible to hide the fact of a leak of customers' personal information.
At first, Johnnyhell was not very willing to make contact and make the price concessions I needed, but my considerable experience in dealing with hackers allowed me to always achieve acceptable conditions for myself, and Johnny was no exception - right up until my arrest, I took dumps only from him. Our mutually beneficial cooperation brought me about $50 thousand a month, despite the fact that I devoted no more than three hours a day to direct work.
My Kiev acquaintances Sasha and Sergey did not know my income level, but they suspected that it was much higher than theirs, and they had hatched a cunning plan. I knew that they were plotting something against me (the world is not without good people), but I did not imagine how dirty a method they would choose to do it.
At that time, I lived on Saksaganskaya, one of the most prestigious streets in modern Kiev. One day at noon, when I was still asleep, Sergey called me, asked what I was doing, and said that he would come by in a couple of hours. There was time to sleep a little more, and I slipped under the covers. I was awakened by the doorbell. Without really waking up, I went to the door and looked through the peephole. There was no light in the entrance, which, however, did not surprise me much - light bulbs were constantly stolen.
- Who's there? - I asked in a sleepy, unsteady voice.
- Neighbors, - I heard from behind the door.
- What do you want?
— You're flooding us with water!
— What the hell, water? — I managed to figure out. — I live on the first floor.
— Okay, Sergey, open up, — and I automatically, I don't know why, opened the front door. Something silently clicked in my head: I decided that since they called me by name, it meant that it was someone I knew. This obsession lasted only a second, but it was enough for me to open the door to strangers myself — no one knew the address of this apartment except Sasha, Sergey and Katya. Three people entered the apartment, one of the strangers showed me the ID of a colonel of the Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime (GUBOP), and they immediately began to behave like they owned the place — they searched the entire apartment for money, computers and other valuables. There were $29,000 in cash in my house, six of which were lying right next to my laptop, and the rest were in a pile of dirty laundry in the drum of the washing machine. I was going to give this money to my mother in Minsk yesterday, but I overslept the train and was too lazy to even take the money out of the apartment, knowing that something very bad was being planned against me. An unforgivable oversight.
The cops, among whom, as it turned out later, were a captain, a major and a colonel - all from the same department, took my laptop, two mobile phones, $6 thousand, one of them threw my machine gun over his shoulder, and we left the apartment. It's good that they didn't find the "plastic" - under the linoleum in one of the rooms there were about two hundred top-quality Chinese VISA and AmEx blanks.
- Look, grandpa, what a dangerous criminal we detained, - one of the cops said to the old concierge who looked suspiciously at our company, - he kept a machine gun on the balcony.
- And rightly so, - grumbled the grandfather, - to shoot back at the likes of you.
We got into a beat-up beige “nine” parked around the corner and a couple of minutes later drove into the courtyard of the Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime, which turned out to be on the neighboring Gorky Street.
We went up to the office on the fourth floor, where they immediately, without explanation, began to beat me with their hands and feet, after which they cuffed my wrists so that my hands were tied between my legs, and continued to beat me in a "stretching position". Despite all the horror of what was happening, I soberly assessed the situation and understood that they were beating me half-heartedly, pursuing the goal of scaring rather than crippling. The call that rang out on the captain's mobile phone some time later: "Yes, yes, we have it. Around six o'clock" - presumably from Sergei - only strengthened my guess. I looked at my watch - less than three hours remained until the end of the nightmare ...
The beating and "stretching" did not stop for a minute. I stood with my forehead pressed against the varnished Soviet wardrobe, almost in the splits, after 5-7 minutes my legs would go numb unbearably, and I would involuntarily fall backwards, the weight of my own body squeezing the handcuffs even tighter. The cops took a printout of my cell phone calls from the desk drawer with Sasha’s and Sergey’s numbers circled in red marker, and started asking who these phone numbers belonged to.
“I have no idea whose ‘numbers’ these are,” I insisted. “I get up to fifty calls a day, try to remember them all.
” “You communicate with these subscribers most often,” the corpulent colonel retorted with iron logic.
The abuse continued. The cops started their favorite game of good cop and bad cop — one of them would constantly beat me up, while the other would take me aside and persuade me to tell everything I knew about Sasha and Sergey.
- Do you know who your friends are? - the major, who had not taken an active part in the show before, pressed me. - They are terrible people and do not stop even at murder.
I remained silent. Then the "werewolves" took a battered Soviet-style gas mask with a closed air valve from the closet and offered me to play "elephant". I had already heard about this "fascinating" game and understood well that there was little pleasant in it. In addition, the cops inserted a lit Captain Black cigarette into one of the holes of the gas mask and pulled this rubber stocking over my head. I immediately began to choke, self-control left me and was immediately replaced by panic. I began to break free, bowed my head to my knees, managed to tear this hateful thing off my head.
- My heart is sick, goats! - I shouted. “I’m going to die here now, you’ll be sick of having to deal with it,” and then he received a sensitive side blow to the jaw.
The cops threw me to the floor, the fat "polkan" fell on top with his entire pig carcass and hit me painfully in the chest several times with his elbow. After that, they asked me to write an explanation in which I would tell everything I knew about Sasha and Sergei, the latter's "nickname", as the cops said, was the Gestapo and Figura. I refused. A series of new blows immediately followed, after which they took me to the next office and handed me over to a young investigator with the manners of Heinrich Himmler, where I stood for about an hour on the "stretched lines" and listened to various sadistic nonsense.
I looked at my watch again. I had been at the mercy of the cops for more than two hours, and I was pretty fed up with this drawn-out spectacle. I wrote an explanation in which there was not a word of truth, for which I immediately received several sensitive blows to the kidneys. The cops started to scare me with a “call a friend” – wires from an old Soviet telephone are thrown over my ears and the dial is turned. The higher the number dialed, the more the current increases.
“None of the suspects could stand even the number ‘eight’,” one of the werewolves “sympathetically” informed.
Brrr… Fortunately, I did not experience this torture myself, but I am sure that it was not pleasant. I rewrote the explanation, adding the makes and approximate numbers of the cars that Sasha from Kiev and Figura drove, and some other unimportant details, for the sake of plausibility. This time, too, there was no more than 10% truth in my “confession,” but it nevertheless satisfied the cops completely. For them and my “friends” who were behind all this, the fact of writing itself was important, and not the accuracy of the facts stated. 20 minutes later, one of the cops got a call, and the "werewolves" told me that "serious people from the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs are asking to let me go."
Oleg, Sasha's driver and assistant, came to pick me up, and I left this inhospitable place with relief.
"God save me from friends," I said with relief, "I'll take care of the enemies myself.
" "Is it that bad?" Oleg asked sympathetically, assessing my far from best appearance.
"Well, anyway...
" "Well, I warned you... To get a good enemy, choose a friend: he knows where to strike.
" "You're right, I gave them too much information about myself - both that I'm wanted and what I do. You know, Oleg, I recently read on the Internet that every fifth resident of Russia has faced violence from law enforcement agencies. I think this figure is not much lower in Ukraine. I'm afraid to imagine what would have happened if I had really been suspected of committing some kind of murder, God forbid. I would hardly have gotten out of these dungeons alive...
- Yes, we've had cases where people jumped from the fourth floor of the police station - they couldn't withstand the torture.
— In Belarus, such things happen very rarely. Because the police work the way they are allowed to work. And our prosecutor's office strictly suppresses such methods of "investigation".
I never got back to my apartment. Oleg took me straight out of town to Sasha. Figura was there too, and they immediately began to scold me that I "did not observe due caution, and if it weren't for their close friend who lived in my house and accidentally saw me being taken away, everything could have ended very badly". It goes without saying that the further course of the conversation suggested that I should thank my benefactors, namely: buy a new Toyota Camry for $40 thousand. It was very disgusting to listen to all this nonsense, but I shouldn't have pretended that I knew the true state of affairs. Sasha had my explanation in his hands, he shook it in front of my face, reading the phrases out loud, and tried to reproach me.
My phones, computer, money and apartment keys were left at the GUBOP, but Figura, realizing that I would not be able to continue working without them, brought me everything except the money and keys. I lived in a temporary rented apartment, under the constant supervision of their man, and I did not even have the phone number of the owners of my apartment on Saksaganskaya to get spare keys from them and take the "plastic" and the remaining money.
My things were transported by Sasha and Sergey, who had previously thoroughly searched my apartment together with the "werewolves" from the GUBOP. Even here they showed their pettiness, "forgetting" to bring my LCD TV, which Figura had long had his eye on, and an expensive electric kettle. In the situation that happened, I made another mistake: in Kiev, I lived with other documents, which are now in my previous apartment, and my Belarusian passport was with Sergey (so as not to keep several passports at home under different names). Now I understand that it would have been much better to keep all documents, money and other valuables in a safe deposit box, which only I and, for example, my mother would have access to. A week later, Sergey brought my own blue passport. Did my "friends" guess that I was going to leave? I think they allowed this thought, but refused to believe it until the very end.
It took me about a week to lull the vigilance of my "controller", having won him over, I packed my simple belongings, took a taxi and left the city under cover of night. Fidel invited me to Odessa, but I went to Minsk, having first made sure through the right people that they were no longer looking for me in Belarus.
Later I learned that Sasha was very angry with Figura for going too far with the forceful influence on me, because of which they lost a source of small, but regular income, but it was too late.
However, there was something to learn from them: both carefully monitored their safety, clearly understood that a long meeting leads to failure, and never met for more than 30 minutes: they always arrived at the “meeting” in advance and leisurely looked at those present, chose escape routes; cars were always parked facing the possible departure side; when we worked at ATMs, fake sidelocks, hats and scarves - bright details by which they would search - were our faithful companions. It got to the point of being ridiculous: Sasha even preferred to enter the PIN code on the ATM keypad with a bent knuckle. Of course, we left our cars a few blocks away from the place of the upcoming “work”. We also gave code marks to the places we visited most often, and on the phone you could only hear: “Where are you?” - “On the “boards”” (a bar similar to a beer barrel). Or "at the base" (at home), etc. You will say, paranoia? Perhaps, but strict adherence to these and other safety rules made us practically invulnerable.

Chapter 25
JonnyHell
Pasha and Stepan met me on the way to Minsk. The guys told me that our Minsk criminal case was suspended, but made it clear that my presence in my home country was extremely undesirable. However, their opinion at that moment interested me the least. The summer passed quite calmly and measuredly: the work of the forum was fully debugged, the alliance with JonnyHell brought me a very high income, and I was not looking for new directions for work. Katya flew to the States, I bought myself a new Mercedes E-class, and my brother and I drove around the city all day and had fun, devoting no more than three hours a day to work.
Due to the nature of my work, I had to communicate a lot with clients and partners from different countries. Most of them were from Southeast Asia (China, Malaysia, the Philippines), and there were never any problems with them.
Asians have a completely different worldview from ours, and such concepts as honor, duty, keeping one's word and decency are not empty words for them. Americans are mostly a bunch of rabble - after all, historically, the United States was a haven for all sorts of vagabonds, escaped convicts and adventurers. Of course, this has left an imprint on the minds of many Americans. The Balts talk a lot and beautifully, but they fizzle out when it comes to real action. Moldovans are scammers, every single one. Romanians - half of them. In general, it was the most difficult with residents of the former USSR: Russians are not capable of long-term partnerships and prefer to "rip off" a partner for at least $100, but now, instead of making millions with him tomorrow. On the Internet, in general, it’s very common to get scammed – in many cases, you don’t even know what country your partner is from, not to mention their personal information, so many deals have to be made solely on trust.
The scammers (we called them rippers) were small, like flies, and practically harmless, just taking up time, but there were others, more seasoned ones - they would gain the trust of forum members, honestly fulfilling orders for some time (for example, cashing out Western Union) and collecting positive reviews, and during a particularly large transaction they would simply disappear with the money. This type of scammers was the most unpleasant. When there were too many rippers, someone came up with the idea of creating a special website kidala.info, where information about new scammers and simply suspicious types was regularly published. One morning Johnnyhell called me and offered to meet on neutral territory - in Moscow.
- Come, Polisdog. We'll meet in real life, drink, hang out with some chicks. Bring whoever you want - I'll treat you, everything is on me, - Johnny listed all the reasons why we should meet.
I immediately contacted Kaiser and invited him to join us. To complete the picture, Johnnyhell dragged two porn stars from St. Petersburg.
“Where are we going, young man?” the taxi driver opened the door of his car at the Belorussky Station.
“To the President Hotel, on Yakimanka,” I answered.
“Two thousand rubles.”
“Are you completely out of your mind?!” I was amazed at such impudence. “Five hundred rubles at most...
” “Well, you’re going to the President Hotel...” the driver muttered discontentedly.
“That’s why I’m going there, because I don’t pay the likes of you two grand.
” I walked about two hundred meters from the station, raised my hand, and the first taxi that stopped took me to Bolshaya Yakimanka for eight hundred rubles. Kaiser arrived the next morning.
— Sasha, — a fair-haired guy with grey, slightly bulging, almost transparent eyes introduced himself with a slight Baltic accent when I went down to the lobby of our hotel.
— Sergey, — I shook Johnnyhelle’s hand.
— Let’s get acquainted. Let’s go have a bite to eat, shall we? — the blond suggested.
— Where? — In Moscow, which resembled a giant anthill, I had very poor orientation.
— To Manezhnaya Square, to Okhotny Ryad. There’s an excellent Czech restaurant called “U Shvejka” there.
This restaurant was located on the lower, very last level of the Okhotny Ryad shopping centre, an exhibition of human vanity, where the prices in the boutiques amazed even our imagination.
— What would you like to eat? — Johnny asked after I quickly ran my eyes over the menu.
— Sasha, your choice. I take it this isn’t your first time in this pub.
— Well, yes, indeed. Then fried sausages and cut beer.
— What beer?!
- You'll see now.
The "cut" beer turned out to be a cocktail of four or five different types of dark and light beer, which were carefully poured into a glass in layers and did not mix with each other due to their different densities. Something like a "Bloody Mary", only made of beer - but incredibly tasty and expensive - about $20 for a half-liter glass.
The next day, Kaiser arrived, who, to my surprise, turned out to be only seventeen years old, and another guy from Minsk, who "laundered" Johnny's money in offshore accounts, and we hung out with porn star girls in saunas, restaurants, and sometimes just hotel rooms.

Chapter 26
The Sentence
Investigator Makarevich, to his credit, kept all his promises and even, in violation of all rules, let me read the accompanying note, which is attached to every criminal case and lists all the mitigating and aggravating circumstances, the investigator's opinion on the personality of the accused, the recommended punishment, etc. Although we were on different sides of the barricades and I, of course, had no reason to like him, Makarevich's self-sufficiency, his independence from his superiors and his loyalty to his word inspired only respect.
The judge was the same as the first time. Now, taking into account all the mitigating circumstances, they could not give me more than an "A", but here's the problem - the final punishment could be assigned by the method of partial addition of sentences, and this was frightening. In addition, Saprykin behaved like a prostitute, during the investigation he changed his testimony several times regarding who gave him twenty white cards with PIN codes, and this could have done me a disservice.
- Accused Pavlovich, where did you get the dumps with PIN codes, which later, to use your language, you wrote down on a white "plastic" and gave to Saprykin? - Judge Gonchar, a plump, masculine woman in her early thirties, began from afar.
- I, your honor, did not write anything down, did not give anything to Saprykin, did not give PIN codes and, moreover, did not ask him to get cash from ATMs.
- Saprykin claims that everything was exactly the opposite, - a prosecutor named Ermoshin joined the trial. - How do you explain this?
— He has seven Fridays in a week. Please pay attention to his initial testimony given during the arrest: “Pavlovich handed over the cards, gave the PIN codes for them and asked to withdraw cash from ATMs.” During the preliminary investigation, he came up with another version: “Pavlovich did not hand over the “plastic”, but left it in his jacket, which he forgot in my car.” Now he has a third version: “Whose cards they are, I don’t know, we were going to the dacha, and I had many people’s things in my BMW. I don’t know who exactly left these ill-fated cards.” From the first day and throughout the investigation, I claimed that I had nothing to do with this “plastic”. Moreover, during the arrest, the cards were found in Saprykin’s car in a pack of Winston cigarettes. I smoke Marlboro. And Ilya smokes Winston. I told the detectives that they needed to take fingerprints from the cards, but apparently the police didn’t benefit from that.
— Pavlovich, how do you explain that the same dumps and “pins” that were on the cards that Saprykin voluntarily gave up were found on the hard drive of your computer? — the judge asked, sensing that she had caught me out.
— I don’t deny that I sold dumps, including those with “pins.” Saprykin could well have bought them from one of those to whom I sold them.
— Witness, — the prosecutor asked, turning to Ilya, — so which of your versions should we rely on?
— The first: Pavlovich gave the cards and asked to withdraw cash from ATMs, — Ilya muttered uncertainly.
— He’s lying! — I couldn’t stand such impudence.
— I understand, — it’s even surprising how the prosecutor got it, — Your Honor, — the “blue jacket” addressed the judge, — I ask you to write a motion to the prosecutor’s office to initiate a criminal case against Ilya Aleksandrovich Saprykin for knowingly giving false testimony.
— All later, now we’ll continue the hearing. Pavlovich, let’s get back to the question of where you got the dumps with PIN codes, — Judge Gonchar asked another uncomfortable question.
* *
Nikron hacked a small supermarket chain in Atlanta, which had only eight POS terminals, but the data from them flowed into a very easy-to-hack SQL database. Databases are the basis of many modern web applications. They store access and authentication parameters, financial information, customer contacts, their preferences, purchase data, etc. SQL is the basic query language of modern databases that make websites convenient for customers. But it is SQL injection attacks that turn database-based sites into vulnerable objects. Today, this method of intrusion is the most widespread - 62% of web applications are vulnerable to SQL injection.
When your card is swiped in a POS terminal, there are two possible scenarios: if the store is small, the POS calls directly to the processing center of the bank that issued the terminal — via a modem, GSM channel, or the Internet. If it is a larger store or an entire retail chain, the POS connects to the main server of the store (or several stores at once), which then connects to the merchant or issuing bank to confirm the transaction. Almost all merchants are Internet organizations, and accordingly, most POS terminals are connected to the Internet. Our supermarket chain belonged to the second type. In addition, in addition to dumps, PIN blocks were also saved there.
What are PIN blocks? According to the rules of payment systems, the PIN code should not appear in the open anywhere, with the exception of well-protected cryptographic HSM modules, so in unprotected areas of the network it “travels” in a special “boat” called a PIN block. The task was complicated by the fact that the "pins" were encrypted with the symmetric block cipher TripleDES, which can only be cracked by a full search of the key, and the key length of 112 bits significantly exceeds the current threshold for "breaking" symmetric encryption algorithms (approximately 80 bits) and will remain sufficient for the next thirty years or so. Nevertheless, we did not give up trying to decrypt the "pins". Let me explain what we were counting on.
Where does a PIN come from? For example, when issuing new cards, the VISA system, for security purposes, recommends that the PIN for a specific card not be chosen randomly (especially the cardholder should not be allowed to choose it, since he can choose a PIN that is easy to guess), but be obtained through cryptographic transformation of the account number. Then the banks must combine the resulting "pin" value with the card number and encrypt the resulting combination again. However, not all banks do this, and some “especially gifted” ones also keep the encrypted value of the “pin” (PIN block) in a file. This means that a hacker can get the encrypted value of the PIN code from his own card and search the database for all other dumps with the same “pin”. As you can see, there is enough simplicity for every wise man. Applying this principle to our Atlanta database, I found a person who went to the right store, made a purchase with his credit card, told us his PIN code (and then the “pins” from hundreds of other cards), we found the encrypted values of these “pins” and thus learned all the PIN codes in the database.
- Accused, - Judge Gonchar distracted me from my memories, - I repeat my question: where did you get the PIN codes for the dumps?
- Your Honor, I bought the cards with the “pins” from someone on the Internet. I can’t remember who exactly, but I’m talking some kind of nonsense, which, surprisingly, is accepted.
— Do you know where your friend with the “originally Russian” surname Drankman is now? — the judge asked about Nikron, as if she had read what I had just been thinking.
— No, I don’t know, — I answered, and thought to myself that, thank God, Nikron was doing well now — a family, children, and, surprisingly, a legal job.
At this point, the trial ended, and the prosecutor asked to sentence me to a total sentence of eight years in prison. Considering the unpredictability of Judge Gonchar, who had given me an “A” in the first case when I had only asked for three and a half, I was mentally prepared to hear the number “ten.” Fortunately, everything worked out, and I was given only a year more to the four I had previously.
We made a lot of mistakes. There was the human factor — in the morning the head of security was warned about the increasing number of thefts, and in the evening we dropped by this particular store; and long-term work in one place (we worked in Minsk for three weeks); and the discrepancy between the appearance and behavior of the cost of the purchased item. Coming to pick up stolen goods in an armored car was, of course, the height of stupidity.

Chapter 27
The Price of Freedom
“Galina Arkadyevna, this year that was added spoils the whole picture for me,” I began a conversation with my lawyer the next day. “We should remove it. Then I’ll only serve two years in total and get ready to change my regime, I’ve already calculated everything. Otherwise, I’ll have to ‘hang’ here for six months longer.”
“And what do you suggest?
” “Well, talk to one of your people, discuss it...”
* *
“I’ve agreed!” my lawyer beamed with importance a week later. “... twenty thousand.
” “Holy cow!” I blurted out. “Why so much? I heard that this pleasure costs $1,000 for each year removed...
” “First of all, that hasn’t happened for a long time. Secondly, read what the newspapers write about you, - the lawyer put the latest issue of BelGazeta on the table in front of me.
"Last year, the Central District Court of Minsk found 22-year-old Sergei Pavlovich guilty of selling "counterfeit payment cards". As the investigation established, in 2003-2004 Pavlovich, known online under the nickname?oliceDog, created the Internet project DumpsMarket, where carders actively communicated. According to law enforcement estimates, Pavlovich sold about 11.5 thousand plastic cards and their details, receiving an income of over $530 thousand. And the damage caused to banks and payment systems exceeded $15 million."
- How much, in your opinion, should the judges ask for if they find out that you have $500 thousand in cash?
- But not all of this amount belongs to me - I sent about half of the money to Johnnyhell and Black Monarch, who supplied me with dumps, - I tried to knock down the price.
- In general, the amount is known, the rest is up to you. If you decide, let me know, we'll file a complaint. By the way, why did they charge you such a huge amount of damage - over $15 million?
— Well, my verdict says it in black and white: “The guilt of the accused is confirmed by written materials of the case: a letter from VISA Europe dated July 26, 2005, according to which 95 files stored on encrypted disks of the laptop of Pavlovich S.A. contain information about 22,452 Visa bank plastic cards, from which, using 6,532 cards, thefts in the amount of $15,151,984.44 were committed.” They could have written more — I sold at least twice as many cards, they just weren’t all stored on my computer.
— And who exactly was harmed? — Galina Arkadyevna didn’t let up. — The cardholders?
— No, no, the cardholder doesn’t suffer any losses — all accounts in American and European banks are insured. True, according to the rules of payment systems, if the transaction was made using a PIN code, for example, at an ATM, then the money is not returned to the cardholder, but here too there are options: for example, the cardholder will prove that he did not leave the USA, while money was withdrawn from his card in Belarus. In short, in 99% of cases, the damage is caused not to the cardholders or even to the banks, but only to the insurance companies in which banks and payment systems insure their clients' accounts. Well, these ones will not go poor - so I sleep peacefully, cardholders with an outstretched hand do not appear in my dreams at night, - I finished. - By the way, what happened to my Mercedes?
- Confiscated for the benefit of the state. The judge initially gave it to your aunt, to whom it was registered, but the prosecutor's office immediately filed a protest: they say that in fact this car belongs to Pavlovich, which is confirmed by the history of his correspondence in ICQ. It was necessary to store more "history" of messages ... Why was this necessary?
— I thought it would come in handy for resolving possible disputes with dump buyers…
— Well, it came in handy — minus $50,000, — the lawyer summed up. — By the way, why did you have the license plate 9999TE on it? You couldn’t have made it simpler?
I kept quiet.
— All this “show-off” of yours, you want to stand out, — Nesterovich cut without a knife. — The license plate on your car should be as hard to remember as possible — anything can happen in life. Oh well, don’t be upset, it’s just a piece of iron, you’ll buy yourself another one. In the future, you’ll be smarter and won’t brag to all your friends about what you bought, how much you paid for it, and who you registered it to. Although sometimes even that doesn’t help. The situation: you have a car under a power of attorney, in order to protect it from possible confiscation, it’s registered to a distant relative or even a “left” passenger. More often, of course, to relatives. The cops know that you are the de facto owner of the car, but they can't prove it. What happens next? Something like this: they call Vasya, who your car is registered to.
- Hello, Vasya Pupkin?
- Yes, why?
— Investigator Ivanov. An accident involving your vehicle of such-and-such make, state registration number such-and-such occurred, as a result of which two children died. The culprit of the accident fled the scene, but we suspect, and the cameras confirm this, that you were behind the wheel. How could it not have been you? Well, a criminal case has been opened on the fact, you need to come to us for questioning and other investigative actions. The entire conversation is being recorded on a dictaphone. The prosecutor's sanction, of course, is available. Most likely, the person who is suddenly bombarded with a stream of such information will get confused and start making excuses, like, it wasn't me, the car was only registered to me, and the real owner is Mr. such-and-such. His last name is such-and-such, address, phone number, everything right down to the address of his mistress - just so as not to have problems with the law. And that's all the cops want. Finita la comedy, in short. Therefore, if you register your car in the name of a front man, make sure that everything is in order with the income declaration (it should be enough to buy a similar car), and with the driver's license, and, most importantly, with your brains... In short, Sergey, I have to go, - finished Galina Arkadyevna. - If you decide to write to have a year taken off, give me a signal.

Chapter 28
Postal
One morning, when I was looking through the list of "malyavs" that passed through our hut overnight, I saw that a certain Ilya Saprykin was looking for someone. Bah, isn't this the Ilyusha I would really like to see? True, he was not looking for me.
- Andrey, - I turned to Filonov, - it seems that my debtor has stopped by, 18k "green" is hanging. In addition, he testified against me. Let's take him to our hut.
- Well, go ahead, - agreed Phil and signed up to see the "godfather".
The next day I was waiting impatiently for Filonov to return from the offices.
- In general, it's him, - Phil began, - both the patronymic and the year of birth match. True, there is one "but" - your potential "sucker" is now in the hospital, his heart is cross. Besides, his mother drove up to one of the local authorities and asked that after the medical unit Ilya be moved to the "new" building and assigned to a small hut. Well, albeit with difficulty, but I solved this issue - after discharge he will be with us.
A few days later Andrei Filonov was ordered to be transported - he "put" a customs officer in the hut for money at the wrong time, the brother of this officer turned out to be a big shot in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and Phil was sent to the camp.
- Dima, in a few days a goose will come up to our hut, - I turned to Baton, - my debtor. Phil and I mixed all this up, but you know. We should "nail" him from the start, so that he doesn't even twitch anywhere.
- Let's do it, I'm all for it, - agreed Baton.
— I don’t know exactly when they’ll wake him up, and no one else knows, except for his attending physician, but as soon as he enters the cell, I’ll “signal” to you, and I’ll crawl under the blanket and listen to what he’ll “weave”. Bring him out in conversation on me — he’ll probably say too much. Well, it’s not for me to teach you, anyway.
— Okay, kid, — Baton understood everything at a half-word.
Five days passed. Towards evening, the “brakes” opened.
— Dima, it’s him, — I whispered and darted under the blanket.
— Hello, guys, — Ilya quickly learned the prison slang.
— Hi, come in here, — Baton called him. — Who, where from, article?
— From Minsk. Ilya.
— What article?
— 212th…
— What is it? — Baton skillfully played the “bull”.
— Computer…
— A hacker, or what?
- Well, yes, - Saprykin answered uncertainly.
- I knew one young "suitcase" with the same article... - Dima drawled thoughtfully, - I crossed paths with him here. Maybe you know him? His name is Sergei, I think his last name starts with "p."
- Of course I know, - Ilya perked up. - And I know him well. He works here in prison as a gruel maker.
- Who did you say he works as? - Baton grimaced with disgust.
- Well, in the maintenance department, delivering gruel.
- An interesting version, but I have different information.
- No, - Saprykin stood his ground, - I know for sure.
- Exactly... And you don't admit that you could be wrong? I'm even somewhat sure that you are wrong, since he would definitely not go to the "gruel..."
- No, I KNOW!.. - Ilya seemed completely confident in his rightness.
- You know... What if it turns out that you're lying? After all, this will be an intrigue, a scoundrelly act, and do you know what they do to intriguers?.. - Dima reproached Saprykin with his own words.
I must say that by that time I was tired of lying under a hot double blanket and listening to this drawn-out dialogue. I crawled out of my hiding place, walked around Ilya - he was sitting opposite Baton's bunk and couldn't see what was happening behind him - abruptly sat down next to Dima and put my left hand on Saprykin's shoulder:
- Well, hello, Ilyusha! Didn't think that we would meet like this? You don't have to answer - I can see from your face that you didn't think so... The Earth... it's round.
For a few minutes I sat opposite him and studied with interest this man who had recently been close to me - not exactly a friend, but we had worked and had fun together. A person can tell us anything, but his true nature is revealed in his actions. And if he says one thing and does another - you need to stay away from such people. You shouldn't forgive anyone for lying, especially friends. The problem is that we love our friends and turn a blind eye to many of their seemingly innocent deceptions. Over time, these lies accumulate like a snowball and hit us hard on the head - these people are the first to betray. I forgave Saprykin a lot...
Ilya's voice had already stopped trembling treacherously, and only his eyes betrayed the horror he had recently experienced. I returned to my bunk and called him over. I brought him up to speed on life in the cell, told him what he could and couldn't do, and said that while I was in the cell, no one would touch him. I hadn’t talked to anyone I knew from my free days for a long time – the last one was Oleg Bunas, and I was interested in literally everything: news and gossip about the lives of mutual acquaintances, the circumstances of Ilya’s case, and especially how and when he was going to repay me. It turned out that for six months, Saprykin and his accomplice Artem Burak had been withdrawing money from ATMs using counterfeit American cards, thus stealing about $200,000.
– Ilya, I heard rumors that after I was “accepted,” you worked for the cops from Department “K” – you paid them, and also “snitched” and were practically Novik and Miklashevich’s personal driver. Now you’re sitting across from me. Something doesn’t add up here. If you were of such interest to them… In short, I want to hear your explanation.
– The same operatives who took us – Novik and Miklashevich. The investigator is Makarevich. All this time, Artem and I were under a written undertaking not to leave the country, but as soon as the trial began, they immediately changed my preventive measure.
- Why would that be?
- Remember how we went to Spain together?
- You can forget that. It seems like it happened yesterday...
- So, I was getting ready to go there. I started applying for a Schengen visa, the cops somehow found out about it and changed my preventive measure. That's how I ended up in a pretrial detention center.
- What's the story with the "personal driver"?
- A couple of times the cops were asked to meet their foreign colleagues at the airport with a car, nothing more.
- I get it. Did you think you could buy your freedom this way?! Okay, you better tell me why you testified against me? - I moved on to the second part of the "Marlezon ballet". - You couldn't say that one of those guys who already left forgot the "plastic" in your car? The same Error, for example, or Johnnyhell, it doesn't matter. No man - no problem. And I would have denied everything, and that would be the end of it. They tricked you like a first-grader. You broke down at the very first interrogation! - I started to lose my temper.
— Right after we were “taken”, I called the lawyer, and he advised me to blame everything on you, to exclude the “group of people” and thus ease your situation, — Ilya lied brazenly, but, I must admit, skillfully.
— Okay, — I changed my anger to mercy, — you will sleep there, — and pointed Ilya to the bunk in the middle of the cell, not the worst, but further away from me.
The next day Baton, with whom we had managed to become close friends over the two years spent in the same cells, left for the stage, and a few days later Ilya was pulled out of the cell too — apparently, his mother’s pleas and money had finally reached the prison authorities. I don’t know if this made him happier, but it upset me, because, firstly, I felt more cheerful with him, and secondly, I didn’t have time to get a receipt for the debt from him.

Chapter 29
Freedom
I am free, like a bird in the sky,
I am free, I have forgotten what fear means.
Gr. "Aria"
Until the very last minute, I did not know the exact date of my release - the documents on the presentation for parole had been sent to court two weeks ago, and now only God knew when the judge would review them and return them to the pre-trial detention center. Therefore, when on the twentieth day of agonizing waiting, in the evening, at about 4 p.m., an emotionless voice behind the door said: "Pavlovich, take your things!" - I was completely unprepared for this. My consciousness was clouded, I got dressed on complete autopilot, put important books, postcards and especially heartfelt letters into my backpack, drank tea with different people, they told me something, asked for something, wished for something, but I no longer heard all of this.
The clanking of the “brakes” (only now do you fully understand why this massive steel door is called that), the heart begins to beat so fast and hard that it seems as if this joyfully sublime knock can be heard far around, goes around the iron stairs, the dark prison corridors, is reflected from the ancient vaulted ceiling and like a spring minstrel bursts back into the heart. Ten uncertain steps, twenty, thirty, a hundred... again a dark, shabby and cold “sedimentation tank”, however, now it already seems simply poorly lit, slightly uncleaned and cool from the fresh spring wind... another 20 minutes of waiting... a “wolf ticket” (a certificate of release) in your hands... a call to mom: “Meet me. - I can’t, I'm alone at work, there is no one to leave the pharmacy to”... The creak of the door closing behind me... and FREEDOM!!!
No, my head doesn't spin from an excess of feelings and fresh air, and I don't experience anything particularly new or joyful. My consciousness almost immediately switches to a new task, and I'm already thinking about where to get a taxi, where to go, what to say to whom when I meet. True, prison still leaves its heavy mark on me - this is expressed in the fact that I avoid people many meters away and it constantly seems to me that this entire huge crowd of people is looking only at me, although, most likely, these people, tired after a long day of work, do not notice anyone around and think only about how to quickly return to their warm and cozy houses and apartments. Home 'a... Am I really home now? It's so hard to believe. And only after jumping into a taxi and giving the address of the drugstore where my mother worked, I finally relaxed and looked at my watch: Wednesday, April 11, 2007.
The American intelligence services were very surprised that I managed to serve only two and a half out of six years, however, Belarusian legislation allows this to be done: one year was “cut off” under the amnesty, and in accordance with Article 91 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, I had to serve half of it before my imprisonment was replaced with a more lenient punishment.
My brother, who had been living in Kyiv for two years by that time, happened to be in Minsk by a lucky coincidence, and when I called him, he was meeting my Katya. They arrived half an hour later. Only my mother was crying, and that was from joy. We drank Martell XO from Dima’s and my old supply and talked endlessly. Katya left. I expected to see her closer to nightfall, but she apparently had other plans. I didn’t insist, and my brother and I spent the whole night drinking. I remember how at five in the morning we went to see the new National Library… The next day, Dima flew home, and I called Katya. We had a lot to say to each other, and I didn’t understand her, who kept refusing to meet. A few months before her release, “well-wishers” wrote to me that they had seen Katya in the company of some guy and that they were clearly flirting. At the time, I didn’t attach any importance to it, as I was 100% sure of my girlfriend. But when she still didn’t find the time or desire to see me for several days, my confidence was no longer so unshakable. At the same time, I refused to believe that our relationship was in the past and tried to find an explanation for her behavior. I don’t know what kind of struggle was going on inside her during those days, perhaps she simply couldn’t figure herself out and wondered if her love for me was as strong as it had been in the first days of our relationship – after all, we had been apart for two and a half long years – or maybe Katya was waiting for me to take certain steps. I don’t know. I myself couldn’t figure out my feelings. Did I love her? Had I ever loved her at all? I couldn’t, or perhaps I was afraid to, answer these questions for myself. Now, as I write this book and LOVE the best woman in the world for me, who gave me the joy of this feeling for the first time, I understand that no. At that moment I thought it was love, but in reality we just felt good together. You can’t fool yourself… Did she love me? Of course, yes. Only a truly and devotedly loving woman could endure all the trials she had to endure, do it with such dignity and stay with me no matter what.
We saw each other only four days later. We went shopping - I was updating my wardrobe, and dropped into our favorite little cafe "Grunwald", which was very opportune for the upcoming conversation. We got some dessert, drank a glass of wine, had a nice chat about abstract topics, ordered coffee. No one dared to be the first to talk about what worried us most. Finally, Katya could not stand it and asked me directly what I thought about the prospects of our further relationship. Her strange behavior of the last few days, her unwillingness (or fear?) to see me, her distant coldness did not allow me to correctly assess the situation, try to understand Katya, dispel her fears and doubts, and pushed me to an ill-considered decision. As luck would have it, an incomprehensible thought was spinning in my head that you can’t step into the same river twice, and I did not dare to continue the relationship.
“We could try to start all over again,” Katya said, “but if you don’t want to, then it’s pointless,” she added with disappointment.
I don’t know if she was ready for such a turn of events, but what happened between us that day was entirely my fault. I thought only of myself, didn’t try to put myself in her place, and essentially pushed away this woman who was so dear and close to me, erasing two and a half years of tears, expectations, hopes, and worries from her life.
“So who are you after that?” I ask myself now. A narcissistic egoist, that’s who you are, Sergei Pavlovich. I don’t know how my life would have turned out if I hadn’t pushed Katya away at that moment – history doesn’t know the subjunctive mood. Perhaps we would have gotten married, had children, and lived happily ever after. “Stop!” I catch myself thinking. You forgot to add that you would have continued to cheat on her, you rare bastard. "You just weren't worthy of this woman, so fate separated you two," someone invisible from above whispers to me...

Chapter 30
I remember the time...
Bender: "I need five hundred thousand and if possible right away, not in parts!" - "Maybe you'll take it in parts?" asked the vengeful Balaganov. Ostap looked closely at his interlocutor and answered completely seriously: "I would take it in parts. But I need it right away."
From the film "The Golden Calf"
A person gets used to good things very quickly. And very slowly - to bad things. And vice versa. Bad things are forgotten very quickly. Good things are not forgotten. A week later, I didn't even think about prison.
I was inspired by freedom and the opportunity to do what I want, and not what I am ordered to. From now on, my life belonged only to me, and the ground was slipping out from under my feet.
Kaiser stepped away from business with me, began working with Johnnyhell, selling his dumps and even opened his own checking service. I don’t know how his life is going now, but for me he will always remain a decent person, confirming this by returning my debt of $10 thousand.
Mondeo, who had served only two years out of six in a Belgian prison, was in Hong Kong, where he was engaged in a “pilot” production of some ultraviolet lamps for growing marijuana. Apparently, the two years he spent in a prison near Holland had not been in vain for him. True, his wife Lam, who had been arrested a year after him, given the same sentence, and for whom Michael was very worried, was still in the same prison. They owed me a considerable sum, and I asked Michael to send me a Sony Vaio laptop and an iPod nano player to pay off the debt. In prison, I missed various gadgets and was in a hurry to reduce my own technical backwardness.
Fidel, who had promised to help me with one delicate matter (smuggling alcohol to Yemen), unexpectedly joined the category of people who had become absolutely indifferent to me. But then, frightened by his own courage, he turned off his mobile phone when I, having driven 2 thousand km, was only 20 km from Odessa.
I took up tennis, regularly visited a sporting club, where I sometimes shot up to three hundred rounds a day, and renewed my old connections and acquaintances. For obvious reasons, most of my time was spent chasing women and sex, and I spent hours on the dating site mamba.ru. I didn’t suffer from a lack of money — I got my debts of $90,000 repaid, and I could start almost any business, but I wasn’t eager to dive into work as soon as possible, I was just burning through life and making up for everything I had missed in two and a half years.
I wanted everything at once. I took on the implementation of several topics at once that I had been thinking about back in prison: spam, the cash2hands Internet bank, creating the carderLAB forum, and releasing my own vodka under the super-premium brands HACKER and CARDER. I was only interested in dumps in the context of working on the forum — I wasn’t going to go back to trading them. I lacked competent performers, and I couldn’t handle everything on my own. At the same time, I didn’t want to involve random people in promising projects, and since most of my time was spent chasing women, the work on bringing my ideas to life was moving extremely slowly. Now I understand that spreading myself across many projects at once was not a very smart decision, which didn’t allow me to bring any of them to fruition. Only the Vodka project was 90% completed, and I was a few weeks short of starting sales around the world.
Why did I choose vodka? Because it’s an ideal marketing product. After all, what is vodka? Alcohol, water, and sugar. The cost price of a liter of alcohol does not exceed $3, everything else is pure marketing.
Let's take, for example, Ukrainian vodka "Celsius". What attracts customers to it? It tastes lousy, but it's cheap and beautiful. Packaging design is one of the main ways, along with price, to stand out from competing brands. You can follow the canons of your market, or you can break them - for example, take an atypical color or shape. What did the company "National Alcohol Traditions" do? They copied the design of a bottle of Swedish mineral water VOSS, put on it a label that was not the best, to tell the truth, and conducted a massive advertising campaign. This is how "Celsius" was born - one of the most successful Ukrainian vodka brands. Going against the standards of your category is a risky path, but if you want to stand out, you have to take risks. An innovator must have high expectations, otherwise his idea is doomed to failure.
Thomas Edison, an American inventor and industrialist, said: "Everyone steals in commerce and industry. I have stolen a lot myself, but I can steal wisely." How did the Russian vodka brand "Parliament" come into being? They took a popular brand in another product category (even my mother knows "Parliament" cigarettes) and released a very popular vodka under the same name and even in a similar color scheme.
Let's move on to Kauffman vodka. "The grain for this vodka was purchased in seven regions of central Russia, stored for a long time, and only then the best seventh part was selected from each of the seven batches and mixed. This batch was processed into alcohol," we read in the Kauffman ad. The "legend" is impressive. "Kauffman Inauguration", released for the celebrations in honor of the second inauguration of President Putin, costs $600. Would you pay that much for a bottle of vodka? And $1,000 for the most expensive vodka in the world, Diva? But there are plenty of people in the world who drink it. The value of a thing is sometimes not in what you can achieve with it, but in how much it costs. All limited edition products are based on human egoism and vanity. Our nature has not changed over many millennia, and knowledge of universal behavioral laws will allow you to achieve success in any field - whether in selling dumps or in producing vodka.
In addition, when promoting any product, you must use a clear and distinct message (slogan) addressed to the buyer: "Our principle is to be honest with ourselves and our customers," says Kauffman and boldly indicates on its vodka since 2000 year, that is, it emphasizes that although the brand does not have a hundred-year history, they are not ashamed of their quality. "Driving pleasure" (BMW), "Time is precious when there is little of it" (Blancpain watches), "Live ahead" (Lexus), "It touches everyone" (stopspid.ru initiative), "Made from your desires" (Mercedes-Benz), "Will take care of her when you are not there" (sheared mink blanket from Hermes), "Don't be embarrassed. This is important" (Saugella intimate hygiene soap), "Our letters reach everyone!" (my spammer friends).
Any product you promote, in addition to high quality, should have at least one unique marketing feature inherent only to it. If it is chocolate, it should attract the buyer's attention in the same way as the Kama Sutra chocolate sets. If it is vodka, it should be like, for example, Beluga, where each line speaks of purity and quality. Stand out, do not be like everyone else! Success lies on paths that do not yet exist. So pave your own way, as the Society of Florists and Florists did: in order to increase flower sales, it financed the "invention" of the holiday - Valentine's Day. The example was perfectly understood and developed by the Spanish winemaker Miguel Torres, who created the San Valentin wine. The headache about a symbolic gift for Valentine's Day has been removed. A heart-shaped label and an angel on a string speak louder than any words.
Today, vodka has ceased to be just an alcoholic drink. The quality of the packaging and contents has reached such a level that exclusive vodka is becoming a valuable and desired gift. Many show business stars, politicians and simply famous people produce alcoholic drinks under their own names: billionaire Donald Trump, actor Gerard Depardieu, designer Roberto Cavalli, rapper Puff Daddy (excellent grape vodka CIROC). I'm surprised that there is still no Paris Hilton champagne - she knows a thing or two about self-promotion...
* *
A few weeks after my release, I met with investigator Makarevich, who, at my request, gave me some files from my previous computers. This representative of the most exciting profession was no longer the enthusiastic captain in pants that were too long, but a respectable major who knew his worth. I was sure that he had received a promotion for solving several high-profile criminal cases, including mine, but Makarevich assured me that he had been given another star based on his length of service. We talked without offense and parted without mutual claims. True, less than a week had passed before I noticed a “tail” following me – no less than six plainclothes agents.
Moreover, everything was done on purpose so that I would notice the surveillance. On the evening of the same day when I discovered the “tail”, Makarevich sent me an e-mail in which he offered to meet with some people who wanted to talk to me.
I dialed the number listed. An unfamiliar voice on the other end of the line asked me to come to the Ministry of Internal Affairs building. “When?” I asked. “Whenever it’s convenient for you.” “Okay, tomorrow.”
There was an intercom phone at the entrance to the Ministry of Internal Affairs building. I dialed the number I already knew:
“This is Sergei Pavlovich. I’m downstairs.
” “Okay, I’m coming out. ”
The bespectacled man who came out of the entrance turned out to be the operative Miklashevich, whom I had known for a long time.
“Hello, Sergei. How many years, how many winters…
” “I can’t say that I’m very happy to meet you… What do I owe you?”
“You haven’t changed,” said Novik, an operative I knew, who had arrested me in 2004 along with Miklashevich, who came out after me. “So, how are you, Polisdog?
” “You’re doing… You’d better get your ‘stompers’ away from me.
” “What the hell, ‘stompers’?” the bespectacled man asked with poorly feigned surprise.
“Oh, as if you didn’t know… They’ve been chasing me all over town, breathing down my neck. Identical raincoat trousers, short-sleeved shirts, walkie-talkies that ‘involuntarily’ go off…”
“Ah-ah, so it wasn’t us. It was the Committee,” Novik looked eloquently towards the neighboring KGB building. “Especially since you bought them out.”
“Are you saying that I wouldn’t have bought out yours?”
- That's not the point, - Miklashevich joined the conversation, - it's just that you're unlikely to spot a normal "tail". And from what you're saying, it turns out that everything was done on purpose so that you'd notice them. Okay, let's go to a cafe - we're not really talking on the street - it's not far from here. Are you in a hurry?
- Not really.
I must say that a rendezvous with the police was not part of my usual activities, and just in case, on the way to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, I turned on the voice recorder on my HTC Touch. Not the standard one that comes with every "phone", but a normal advanced program for recording voices, of which there are many on various Internet sites. Setting the signal level, cutting off background noise, recording duration limited only by the size of the flash drive - put the phone on the table right in front of the interlocutor's nose and record to your heart's content without arousing suspicion.
- The main sign of a stalker, - Miklashevich continued on the way, - is inconspicuousness. "Bad" guys rarely wear loose-fitting coats with a belt - your "tail" will most likely be the person you least expect to see. For example, a woman or an elderly person. Surveillance is always carried out in a group, communicating on walkie-talkies or mobile phones. One person walks directly behind you, and the other is far behind, in order to cover the nearest "tail". Other members of the surveillance team can follow you on the other side of the street or on a parallel street. The one following you can change clothes, hairstyle, glasses right on the go. However, the lower part of the wardrobe, such as trousers or shoes, cannot be quickly changed. Pay attention to such signs as height and characteristic facial features, remember personal items such as rings or other jewelry that attract attention. If, when getting off the bus, a face flashed in front of you that you saw an hour ago, then it is unlikely to be a coincidence. However, this is unlikely, since the "tails" work in shifts.
Usually the stalker gives himself away when he loses sight of his victim. Having lost you, the spy will get nervous. Use this against him. A simple example: go around the corner and stop abruptly. Your pursuer will be able to stop only by running into you. If you are walking in the company of another person, let him stop or back away. However, the stalkers will understand that the surveillance has been detected, and this is not good. Do it differently: turn the corner, go into a cafe with transparent windows and watch. Walk-through courtyards can be used for the same purposes. In general, if you suspect that you are being followed, then before going outside, determine your route. Remember that it should not alert the stalkers. Choose a route that includes transfers on public transport.
“Get on the metro or bus at the last minute,” Novik suggested.
“Yeah, I saw that trick in the movies,” I remembered.
— Stand by the back window, — continued the “nerd” Miklashevich, — so that you can watch the road. Don’t look back sharply, don’t get nervous — otherwise, suspecting that you’ve spotted them, the people pursuing you will become even more careful. To find your “tail,” you can use shop windows as mirrors. Throw something on the sidewalk and watch to see if anyone picks it up. Pay attention to people with cell phones, radios, or simply those who often put their hand to their mouth — they may be holding a transmitter. Your main task is to make the spy or spies give themselves away with their non-standard actions, unusual for ordinary people.
— When one of their radios went off next to my car, I quickly jumped behind the wheel, turned around and drove away. Three of them ran about fifty meters after me, then jumped into a silver Skoda… I barely broke away, zigzagged around the city for about five kilometers.
- If you have identified one "tail", it does not mean that you have identified all of them, - Colonel (as it turned out later) Novik perked up again. - Try to remember the registration numbers of the cars that are following you. First increase the speed, then slow down. An inexperienced pursuer will press the brakes to try to catch your pace of movement, or will be confused, trying to disguise or somehow justify his maneuvers. Do this operation several times in order to determine who, as if unintentionally (but, of course, with a purpose), constantly turns behind you. Change the direction of your movement more often - this way you will be able to identify several "tails". Some surveillance teams play with headlights so that in the dark their car looks alternately like a sedan or a motorcycle. This is done with a switch.
- That's clear, - I interrupted. — In the off position, I will see a single headlight in the rearview mirror and decide that the suspicious sedan I noticed earlier has left...
— You can drill a small hole in the rear light of your car — the light will shine a bright white spot, not red or amber, and this will allow the pursuer to remain at a sufficient distance at night even in very heavy traffic. Or you can not bother and just take out one of the bulbs or stick a strip of reflective film on your bumper.
— You also forgot to mention radio beacons — it's the 21st century, GPS is very developed now, — I prompted.
— Well, yes, exactly, — Novik agreed.
— It's all somehow difficult ...
— It is extremely difficult to determine professional surveillance, but it is possible. And in general, you need to monitor your personal safety. So you set up a meeting. Where to meet? An open space is not suitable, as, incidentally, is too closed. I can recommend a café — like we are now...
We were just approaching the Mir Castle café, which is located on Independence Avenue in Minsk — a typical Soviet dive where you can safely drink only tea bags and mineral water. Loud music was playing in the café, which, given my intention to record our conversation, I didn’t really like, but the cops apparently had other ideas. Or maybe it was just a coincidence.
“Don’t sit opposite the windows and doors,” Miklashevich warned, “it’s better to sit with your back to the wall.
” “Listen, Pinkertons, you’re already paranoid,” the show was amusing me more and more.
“Glasses tend to vibrate, you can read lips,” the bespectacled man continued, “by sitting with your back to the wall, you’ll be able to follow what’s going on in the café. It would be even better if you and your interlocutor would communicate not out loud, but by correspondence, - Miklashevich looked around the cafe in search of a good example, probably a laptop, - on paper...
Of course, the cops did not assume that I could record our conversation, otherwise they would not have spoken to me at the top of their voices, but would have followed their own advice.
- And in general, - Novik again switched the conversation to himself, - remember: no matter how insignificant the crime you committed, always, remember, always consider that you did something terrible. Paranoia should be your companion. Otherwise, in 2004, you were so freaked out that you loaded the vodka bought with an illegal card, all thirty cases, right into an armored van.
- It's a little strange to hear such instructions from the lips of cops, don't you think? - I no longer knew what to think.
“Life is a strange thing,” Miklashevich philosophically remarked. Like Novik, he was already wearing shoulder straps with three large stars.
“Have you heard of Bernardo Provenzano?
” “No, but should you have?” asked one of the cops.
— The legendary mafioso, the godfather of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, successfully hid for forty-three years, was never photographed — the police had only one photo of him from forty years ago, only a few of his close associates knew his whereabouts, gave all his orders through pizzini — small notes, and still got caught…
— How? — asked Novik.
— The police traced the route of the delivery of clean clothes from his family’s laundry to the abandoned farm where Provenzano was hiding.
— No matter how long the rope twists… By the way, it was Brick who turned you in.
— What kind of “brick”? — I looked questioningly at the cops.
— Not “what”, but “who”, — Novik kindly explained.
— I don’t know any of them.
— Really?.. Have you seen the movie “The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed”?
— A long time ago.
— It doesn’t matter. There was a pickpocket in there, Sadalsky played him, he kept saying: “Wallet, purse!.. What purse?!” His nickname was Brick. Do you remember his last name?
- No.
- And Kirpich's last name was Saprykin. That's why we nicknamed Ilya Kirpich. If it weren't for his testimony, there would hardly have been enough grounds for your arrest...
- Yes, I already realized that he said everything you needed when he was arrested. Scum.
- That's not the word, - Novik continued. - He whined like a woman so that we wouldn't "lock him up". His dad - well, you know, they have a construction company there, they do design documentation.
I nodded.
- ... owed my friend 60 thousand bucks. And he didn't pay it back. Until we "locked up" Ilya, he didn't return a penny. Well, we locked up our son for a short time - fortunately there were enough grounds, and we hinted to his dad what was what - he immediately returned 50 thousand. But what a Jewish family, damn it - the eldest Kirpich pinched the remaining "ten". I had to put the squeeze on Ilya again.
- So why did you arrest him? I thought he was paying you... a real homie...
- We thought so too. And when, after your arrest, money continued to disappear from Belarusian ATMs, Saprykin was the last person we could think of. Should I tell you how he got busted?
- You're asking!
- He withdrew money from American cards. And in the ATMs where he worked - what a son of a bitch, he somehow found out - there were no video cameras.
- And now they are only in every third ATM... In Minsk for sure.
- How do you know?!
- As if it were an open secret...
- Okay. So, there were no cameras in the ATMs. But there was one camera hanging on a store near one of the ATMs. We played the film - aha, at that time a black BMW "five", in the E39 body, drove up, and you know what? They checked the numbers - it turned out that it belonged to Saprykin's older brother.
- What an idiot! In such cases, the car should be left a quarter away, or even further. When we worked at ATMs in Kiev, we even entered PIN codes with a finger knuckle, so as not to leave fingerprints.
— Some carders enter their PIN on a piece of paper, with their fingernails, or cover their fingertips with hydroxyquinoline, a transparent antiseptic sold in pharmacies as the liquid plaster New-Skin. But that’s all unnecessary, — Novik chuckled. — We identify you differently.
— How?
— Look. You mainly steal money from American cards.
— Let’s assume.
— That’s right — there’s nothing to be caught with Belarusian ones. Today, there are only about a thousand transactions per day on foreign cards throughout Belarus. All payments are processed in one place — the National Processing Center.
— The processing center is the technological core of any payment system, — Miklashevich joined the conversation. — It is here that all transactions are processed in real time. Our guys wrote and installed a sniffer there (apparently, the idea with the sniffer belonged to Miklashevich), analyzing all foreign transactions by the following parameters: large withdrawal amounts, mainly at night, ATMs far from busy streets, and repetition - if the card starts giving, you "milk" it until the very end, right? The system automatically throws up an "alert" (warning) if it encounters these risks, and especially with their combination. Agree, a real American will not withdraw five hundred bucks over and over again at two in the morning from an ATM in Shabany.
- Logical.
- Besides, you often work from the same favorite ATMs - that's where we will wait for you.
- Well done. You came up with a great idea. As BadB would say, everyone gets a B - you get an A.
"Botanist" Miklashevich practically lit up with pride.
— That's nothing, — he continued, — we have our own popular characters on every carding forum. You'd be very surprised if you knew their nicknames and statuses on the forums...
— After verified.ru — a completely and utterly cop forum — I'm not surprised by much anymore.
We'd been chatting for about an hour. I was sipping a still BonAqua bought at the police's expense, Novik was saying something — he turned out to be a fine storyteller — and Miklashevich, wearing a Breitling watch worth about $2,000, was frankly bored and twirling his HTC "pipe" in his hands.
— Nice watch, — I glanced sideways at the Breitling.
— Oh, it's a fake, — Miklashevich tried to joke.
— Well, don't tell me. Are the photos on Odnoklassniki of you and your family vacationing in Miami also a photomontage?
— No, the photos are mine. A business trip, so to speak. The Americans paid... They even allowed me to take my family with me. At least they got to see the ocean...
- So what about the KGB? - I wanted to find out everything about my possible pursuers.
- Yes, exactly, - Colonel Novik, who had been thinking about something, perked up. - Are you aware that the Committee was protecting Zhdanov?
— I heard something…
* *
It all looked something like this.
Sasha Zhdanov is sitting at a table, sipping Clicquot (or Soviet Champagne, if the day is bad), quietly cooing about something with a young lady, cleaning a lobster (or a crayfish, if again the day is bad), the smoke from his cigarette peacefully rises, palm trees are all around (or fir trees, you know about the day). An insistent call on his mobile:
— Hello, this is the Velcom company. Your phone is in roaming, and a large debt has accumulated on your account, please pay it.
— Uh-uh, okay.
— Goodbye.
— Sa-asha, who called?
— Yes, the operator, asking to put money on the account.
— Strange… Since when does a mobile operator call itself…
— Okay, let's move on, better pour yourself some more champagne.
Day 2.
Tr-r, tr-r.
— Hello.
— Alexander?
— Yes.
— The State Security Committee.
— What can I do
for you? — Not a phone call. Could you come over?
— Uh, I’m in Thailand, actually.
— We know. Upon my return, of course.
— Good.
— All the best.
What happened next? Zhdanov returned to Minsk. He probably doesn’t understand why himself. Another person in his place, with that kind of money and a clear head, would have certainly forgotten Belarus as a bad dream and stayed in sunny Thailand, which is welcoming to rich white tourists. But Sasha returned. And, as usual, he arrived at the KGB — it’s not customary to refuse visits to this department in our blue-eyed republic.
“So they lead you into a room,” he told me, “all the tables are covered with computers. And two puny guys about thirty years old, typical ‘nerds.’ Well, we introduced ourselves, as usual:
- Sasha, we know everything you do. About your pyramids on the Internet, about the amounts of income.
- Good. Or rather, bad. So what now? To jail?
- Well, why so soon? We're not the cops, we don't have the task of putting you away.
We're the State Security Committee, you understand?
- To be honest, not quite.
- Okay, not everything at once. In short, we'll help you, and you'll help us.
- I'm not going to snitch!
- That's true, you're not a woodpecker, heh-heh. And no one's asking you to snitch, we have enough informants, they found out about you... Okay, let's move on. We'll have time to talk later.
After that, a cheerful and friendly company, consisting of programmer and part-time follower of the Egyptian pharaohs Sasha Zhdanov and two KGB officers, headed straight to Beltelecom, where the committee members deleted all the logs about IP addresses and Internet access from Zhdanov’s home computer, then to the tax office, where Sasha paid $20,000 in income tax, and then…
— And now, maybe you’ll throw some money at us?
— How much?
— It's up to you.
Zhdanov decided that $10,000 would be enough. And that's how they parted. A week later, the brave committee members found Sasha again... They opened the door of a tightly tinted minibus and... showed him boxes with new office equipment, still in its original packaging.
— Here, Alexander, we bought this with your money. For the needs of our department.
— Congratulations.
— Well, good luck.
— So that they don't bring parcels!.. Pah-pah..."
That's how the KGB began to protect Zhdanov.
* *
— That's true, — Miklashevich picked up. — And even when we had already opened a case against him, his "friends" advised him on ICQ what to say and how to behave during interrogations. As you can see, this didn't save him — we still put him in jail. So the Committee is only using you, but can't really protect you. Or doesn't want to.
— And can you? — I looked at the cops with curiosity.
— What are you doing now? — Colonel Novik preferred to change the subject.
— I work in a construction company.
— As a director?
— No, as a laborer.
— Don’t make me laugh, you — as a laborer too… Show me your hands!
I didn’t immediately understand what was going on, and showed him my palms. Novik examined them carefully.
— Everything is clear: not a single callus. A Ferre jacket, a phone for five hundred, a watch for a fiver…
— I have a change of regime, I can’t not work, — I realized my mistake too late (you have to come to the hospital, the police station, and the tax office dressed as poorly as possible).
— Oh, so that’s it…
— Like you don’t know…
— Well, what are you planning on doing?
— I haven’t decided yet. It’s only been three weeks since I got out of prison.
— Experience shows that even after serving time, most of you return to your previous activities.
— Well, I’ll still try to start a new life.
— Go ahead, try it, — Novik continued to finish me off. — But you know what? "Independent" work has never led to anything good. By the way, who sells dumps now?
- I haven't seen any large databases on the Internet.
- And there weren't any after you. And who sells small stuff?
- I don't know, I need to find out.
- Yeah, find out, find out.
- Okay, I have to go (the conversation had already passed an hour and twenty minutes).
- Wait, let's finish.
- We've been talking for an hour and a half, and I still don't understand what you want from me, - knowing that the voice recorder in my smartphone does not miss a single word, I wanted to hear specific proposals that would turn into valuable dirt. As if he had read my thoughts, Miklashevich carefully picked up my phone from the table, pressed the power button, but only a huge password entry window appeared on the screen, without which it is impossible to see which applications are currently running, he twirled the device in his hands to no avail and put it back. - Let's be more specific.
- Well, in any case, think about our conversation, - Novik said. - You are one of the best carders in the country, and you behaved decently when you were arrested, unlike that same Saprykin. You will return to your old ways anyway. And “independent” work, as I already said...
- So are you offering me your protection?
- Sometimes the unsaid means more. It is better to eat white bread on the shores of the Black Sea than black bread on the shores of the White Sea, - Novik finished.
Yes, it turns out that the Belarusian Department “K” has interesting methods of work: first, to intimidate, organizing some kind of provocation or surveillance, then to shift all the blame to the KGB and offer their “services”.
That night, lying in my bed, I thought about Novik’s words. He was right in many ways. Although I didn't like what he said about me, he was right - the temptation to take up carding was too great... At home, I downloaded the dirt onto my computer and forgot about it until better times.

Chapter 31
The King is Dead. Long Live the King!
The summer was dry and hot, and I enthusiastically indulged in my hobbies and interests, which included hunting and fishing since childhood, and with the advent of money, a passion for collecting watches, a love of Cuban cigars, luxury cars and beautiful women.
I slept with all the women I wanted, but who for various reasons were previously unavailable to me. Two of them intended to break up with their husbands for me, but I tried in every way to dissuade them, citing the fact that we were only connected by sex and I had no plans for a life together with them and would not.
The dating site mamba.ru, on which I spent almost two months without leaving, did not bring me the joy of meeting the one I dreamed of. Yes, there were casual relationships - during this time I arranged "casting" for about thirty girls, but none of them were suitable for the role of the woman of my dreams. With some of them I slept for several months, took them to restaurants and gave them flowers, with others I limited myself to drinking a cup of coffee.
Without even noticing it, I was making notes of successful marketing techniques on Mamba, studying their affiliate program and thinking about creating my own dating site. Back in the early 2000s, I was making good money on the affiliate program of the largest English-language dating site at the time, friendfinder.com, which paid impressive commissions to webmasters who brought new visitors to their site. If a user paid for the creation of a “gold” ($100) or “platinum” ($150) profile, friendfinder.com paid me up to 60% of this amount. It’s understandable, there was nothing stopping me from creating new users and paying for “platinum” profiles with “left” credit cards. Payments stopped only when the percentage of chargebacks (chargeback is a return of payment, made if the cardholder proves that he was robbed) exceeded the permissible norms. With Mamba, for various reasons, this trick would not have worked, but I was not going to — you have to work honestly with “your own”.
Unexpectedly, new amendments were adopted to the Belarusian Criminal Code regulating the activities of dating sites (from now on, the owner of the resource is obliged to demand passport data from all users, one step left, one step right — “human trafficking”, the most fashionable article lately), and I refused to create my own dating site. Of course, I strongly support the efforts of the Belarusian leadership aimed at toughening the fight against the export of our women abroad for the purpose of sexual exploitation, but when they give a real term for creating an affiliate program for Mamba — that’s too much.
* *
After the closure of Planeta, the fall of the English-language carding forum ShadowCrew and the end of Operation Firewall (on October 26, 2004, twenty-six of the most active members of the carding community were arrested around the world), cybercriminals were scared, disorganized and did not have their own home, which CarderPlanet and ShadowCrew used to be for them. Of course, many new forums immediately appeared on their ruins — thecc.ru, vendorsname.ws, StealthDivision, CardersArmy, TheftServices, but it was unclear who owned them — there were many cops and informants on the scene. The English-language forum theGrifters was created with FBI money, and verified.ru belonged to the Samara Department "K". Only ScandinavianCarding, theVouched, TalkCash, DarkMarket.ws and Russian-language CardingWorld.cc and Mazafaka inspired confidence. This continued until mid-2005, when a new major player appeared on the scene — the site CardersMarket.com, the owner of which, as it later turned out, was one of the best hackers in the world, Max Ray Butler (Iceman).
Max Butler hacked all six major forums (TalkCash and Scandinavian Karting had no backups of their databases and sank into oblivion forever), selected all English-speaking users from there (Russians no longer trusted foreign forums) and imported about 4.5 thousand new users to his CardersMarket. Of course, such actions caused a storm of justified indignation in the carding community, but the fact remains: CardersMarket with its 6 thousand unique users became the largest carding forum in the world. This was more than ShadowCrew in its heyday.
What do you think Iceman did when he got his hands on so many potential clients? The same thing that Script, Fidel, me and other carding forum owners did before him - trade dumps. In a short time, Butler became one of the five main dump sellers in the world, in a market traditionally dominated by Russians. He conducted his business with caution: for starters, he stopped selling bin-list dumps, to make it harder for the feds to track his intrusions. Now agents couldn’t buy twenty dumps from one bank and figure out where exactly the owners of all those cards intersected. Max also created an alternative nickname for himself and conducted all sales under the name Digits. This point was the cornerstone of his business strategy: Iceman, the face and owner of the forum, would keep his hands clean, and Digits, his alter ego, would trade in stolen data. In addition, Butler changed his writing style online, because he was afraid that certain phrases, turns of phrase, and punctuation marks that are characteristic of him could give him away…

Chapter 32
Deja Vu
Life is what happens to us just when we have other plans.
J. Lennon
- Hey, Pavlovich, - came from somewhere behind the massive steel door, - wake up, the paddy wagon is waiting.
"What the hell paddy wagon?!" I thought to myself. - I've already served my time, so it was a mistake on your part, "citizen chief." I looked around: a dirty gray concrete "fur coat" on the walls, a low, cobweb-covered ceiling, along one of the walls - a narrow bench with a down jacket thrown over it, in the corner - a dim yellow light bulb and a window in the door, for some reason covered with a fine iron grate. From everything it turned out that I was in some kind of narrow stone cell. Deja vu. I've seen all this somewhere before...
- Well, are you ready? - the voice behind the door did not subside. - We're going to prison.
What kind of news is this?! What have I managed to do that they are taking me to prison again? I have long respected the Criminal Code. Big deal, I did a little spam, porn, pills... But these are all minor things, the article does not provide for up to two years of correctional labor, imprisonment - I specifically clarified. So it seems there is no reason to "lock me up". Although... I still had an unserved sentence, a year and a half, maybe they tacked me on for this? We need to figure this out urgently.
Let's go in order. In strict, so to speak, sequence. On July 27, I flew in from the Maldives, from the other side of the world. What next? I got really sick: bronchitis, rhinitis, sinusitis - everything hurts, basically. I took sumamed, a powerful antibiotic, little blue pills, similar to Viagra, which I have been selling on the Internet for the last six months. What else? I called the KGB and said I was back. They said they would contact me in a few days. And then...
- Baby, they sent me samples of your vodka from France. What should I do with them? How are you feeling, by the way? - Katya's voice woke me up on the phone on Thursday morning.
Katya... And why are all my women named Katya?..

Chapter 33
So beautiful and wild...
When you're bored, you marry a bitch .
Folk wisdom
She was twenty-one when we met. I hadn't been to Mamba for several months and I can't remember what prompted me to come back here. I drove an Audi A8, dined in the best restaurants and dated many women. But none of this gave me pleasure. I had enough money and entertainment, but no interest in life or excitement. And the availability of my old and even completely new girlfriends was getting pretty boring. I wanted adventure and something new.
I went online and typed the letters mamba.ru, which were exciting and intriguing. My profile had VIP status, I often hung in the "leaders" and wrote "I want a bitch", not even imagining what they looked like and what they were all about. New acquaintances, new phone numbers in my address book, promises to meet again and have fun... I knew that this was unlikely to happen - none of them were her.
And then I found... They say the truth: "Be careful what you wish for - it may come true." No, she did not seem like a bitch. Quite the contrary, both externally and internally - a real angel. However, first things first.
September 29, 2 a.m., mamba.ru. I enter the parameters I’m interested in: height 168–178, weight 48–55, age 18–23, city Minsk, gender — female, of course. The result — about five hundred profiles. Too many, of course. My eyes are sticking together, and I can’t find any interesting specimens. Although… my gaze involuntarily stops at one of the profiles. I open the photo… It’s like lightning strikes me. Right in the heart. Yes, this is her. Without a doubt. The one I spent so many sleepless nights searching for on Mamba. Katenka, 21, 172 cm, 48 kg, BMW-325, and a note in her self-portrait: “I’m not a bitch. I was just lucky in life.” Yeah, what a striking texture. An equally interesting profile. It’s obvious that she wrote about herself and about herself. All sleep disappeared. I look through her photos for the hundredth time, save them. I write the usual: "Miss, I'm charmed. Maybe we'll meet for a cup of coffee or something stronger?" I try to fall asleep. It doesn't work. I write to her that she stole my sleep.
In the morning, without washing or having breakfast, I go to "Mamba" again. No answer, and she herself hasn't appeared on the site. Imagining how many fans could write to this charming young creature, I realized that my message simply drowned among hundreds of similar ones. Damn, what should I do? I found a clue in "Self-portrait" - Institute of Modern Knowledge, el diseco del interior - the faculty of design, that is. I figured out the course - judging by her age, third or fourth. I suffer all weekend - no answer. I call my friend Zhukov, print out her photo.
- Gray, here's the money and the photos. Buy a box of decent chocolates and go to the dean's office of the Institute of Social Sciences, - I set the task for my friend. - Give the chocolates to the secretary, show her the photo and find out everything about this girl.
Zhukov can't refuse me. Frivolous, but always cheerful and happy, like an Energizer battery. We have been friends for seven years, since our studies at the journalism department.
Suddenly she answered. It seems on the fifth day. I almost jumped for joy. She left her phone number, added that she was often busy and it would be better for us to see each other in a few days. Again and again I looked through her photos, mentally preparing for the meeting. In some she seemed cheerful and flighty, in others - tender and defenseless. A combination of sensitivity and chastity. And her eyes... she seemed to have stepped out of Goya's paintings, in which children with big eyes are often found, who look at life openly and with interest.
— Hi, — I dialed her number. — This is Versus.
— Well, hello, — the nicest voice I’ve ever heard answered. — How are you?
— Can’t wait to see you.
— Okay. Let’s do it today at eight. Come to Marksa from the circus side. When you get there, call me.
Many of my friends, when they were driving to meet a girl they didn’t know for the first time, would deliberately switch from Lexuses and BMWs to beat-up Ladas, supposedly “so that the girl would fall in love with me instead of my money.” It didn’t seem that important to me, and I didn’t want to switch from a cozy A8 to a ten-year-old Passat, so I went in my own.
“Mademoiselle, I’m here,” I dialed Katenka’s number from memory, which had five identical digits. “Where can I find you?
” “What are you driving?
” “A silver Audi.”
“Ah, I see. Wait five minutes, listen to some music, I’ll be there in a minute.”
An intercom beeped somewhere nearby. I turned around at the sound—a girl had come out of the next doorway and was hurriedly heading my way. I was quickly assessing the stranger, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana watch that covered her entire wrist and an Armani belt covered in rhinestones. “Damn!” Another bimbo. All the talk is about boutiques, cars, clothes, glamorous parties and studying at a fashionable university.
- Katya, - she introduced herself, coming closer.
"Even though she's a bimbo, she's damn attractive," I noted to myself with satisfaction.
- Sergey.
- Sergey?! - She looked at me with distrust with her huge eyes and long eyelashes. - You introduced yourself as Viktor on Mamba.
- It's for conspiracy purposes, - I joked.
- It's good that your name is not Vitya. I hate that name.
- Let's go somewhere.
And we headed to "Territory" - the best Japanese restaurant in Minsk.
- And it's nice here, - Katya glanced around the restaurant's interior.
- Well, yeah, - I agreed and, probably for the first time in five years, examined the decor of the establishment. Low leather sofas, ebony tables, a cone-shaped lamp on a long thin cord, in the light of which the smoke from my Sobranie Black Russian played effectively - it was really great in the "Territory". I enjoyed the excellent food and the view of a wonderful girl across from me. Katya drank the only cup of cappuccino, although, as she admitted after a while, she was very hungry and only her natural modesty did not allow her to "seduce" me to dinner. We talked about everything under the sun, and I really wanted this extraordinary evening, smoothly turning into night, to never end. Maybe I did not remember everything she said that evening, I can forget the sound of her voice, but the look in her pure, happy eyes will remain in my memory for the rest of my life.
The next day we drank mojitos in the "Bronx" and played billiards.
- I look at you and cannot decipher your appearance. You're all so dark, or something, swarthy, - I made a slightly awkward compliment. - There's something elusively southern in your appearance.
- My great-grandfather was an Italian mafioso, - Katya surprised me. - And he disappeared somewhere in America during the Great Depression. Our last name on my mother's side is Romma.
- So that's what it is, your beauty immediately seemed otherworldly to me.
- Let's go to the movies tomorrow, - Katya unexpectedly suggested boldly.
- Why not. With you even to the ends of the earth, - I immediately agreed.
Katya led me through the dark halls of movie theaters for a reason - she could not understand why I did not show obvious physical attraction to her - such a beauty - and believed that the special atmosphere of "kissing places" would help me relax. But this was not so - I was simply afraid of disrupting the natural course of our relationship with hasty actions. I had not yet parted with Katya, as her sweet image was already appearing before my mind's eye.
A week after we met, my friend Valentin, a champion in mixed martial arts, had a birthday. I gave him a bottle of Martel, one of those that Kaiser had brought me for the DumpsMarket anniversary, and a large group of us, about fifty people, hung out at the Overtime club. I felt a little awkward in a company where I knew only a few people, and the alcohol we had consumed was conducive to sentimentality, so I invited Katya to join us. By the time she got there, I had already managed to get drunk, after all, whiskey and juice are tricky things. But the alcohol removed all the inhibitions in my head, and we kissed for the first time.

Chapter 34
The Fighter Against Carders Became... a Carder
We are most willing to believe in what we ourselves desire, and we assume that others think the same way we do.
Julius Caesar
From that day on, we were never apart for more than a few hours. Sometimes we went to the forest: fluffy snow, a soft blanket on the leather seats, the car windows fogged up from our breath. Katya dressed funny in a few seconds, when the headlights of a car that had turned the wrong way interrupted our activity, I got behind the wheel, cleared the way, and everything started again. Katya was studying and could not devote much time to me, although we saw each other every day. A couple of times we raced cars, and although Katya is an excellent driver, she had no chance against my Audi A8 with a 4.2 liter engine in a BMW-325. True, all her men were subjected to this test, and I was no exception.
I rented an apartment (before that I lived with my mother outside the city), Katya added some decor to the interior, and our first house became quite cozy.
She introduced me to her circle of friends - Katya has hundreds of friends and admirers and much fewer girlfriends. I was very jealous, trying to disguise this dangerous feeling as worry for her, and Katya had a hard time getting across to me the idea that she had been brought up in strictness, had been busy all the time at music school, and now she just needed to have fun, spend time at parties and have fun.
From the first day of our relationship, I was honest with Katya. About three months after we met, I told her what I had done in the past and that I had spent the last few years in prison.
— I knew about it, — she surprised me with her confession.
— How?
— And I knew who you were from the very beginning.
— But how?
— I have a lot of friends on the Internet. One of them saw us in the Bronx, your face seemed familiar to him, he made inquiries and told me everything.
Well, there are carders here too!
* *
— Sergei Alexandrovich? — I heard in my phone one evening.
— Yes.
— The State Security Committee. Could you come over?
“Damn it! What could I have gotten myself into already?” I asked myself and found no answer.
— Baby, is everything okay? — Katya asked, seeing the confusion on my face. — Who called?
— The KGB…
— What do they need from you now?
— How should I know? They didn’t explain over the phone, they asked me to come over.
— It’s probably some kind of mistake. You don’t do anything “like that,” Katya reassured me (and herself). — But if they put you in jail, I'm not going to bring you parcels.
"Then I'll find someone who will," I thought to myself with annoyance. But really, what did the KGB want from me? It seems I'm not doing anything particularly criminal... Although... as Cardinal Richelieu said: "Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I'll find something to hang him for." The topic of shopping with counterfeit "plastic", even by agreement with the cashiers, is already dead. I sold thirty dumps to my debtors from St. Petersburg - so that they could repay the debt as soon as possible. I also sold about one and a half thousand to Sonelao, my trusted client. But somehow all this is too small for the KGB - in 2004, it happened that I sold more in a day. No, that's not why they called me. Then what for? Yeah, I was working on creating my new forum carderLAB, which was supposed to be even better than DumpsMarket. I found archives of the now defunct ShadowCrew, StealthDivision, CarderPlanet, carder.org, etc., which were still invaluable sources of information, and planned to connect them to my forum - this would attract many visitors. What I definitely did not plan to do was carding. And I didn’t even create my forum to sell dumps there - I wanted to make the best trading platform in the world for carders and take money for it - that is, not steal, but earn. True, the other day Black Monarch and I returned to our best old topic - getting “pins” through enroll, and although the scheme worked just as well as three years ago, we have not yet managed to do anything serious. So what am I being called out for? And my mom just added fuel to the fire the other day, saying, "When you bought an expensive Mercedes in 2004, you were immediately arrested. Now you're driving an expensive car again - be careful..."
- Okay, honey, don't worry about it, - Katya gently stroked my cheek. - I'm sure this is some kind of stupid misunderstanding.
Yeah, a misunderstanding... Better think about what else you could have screwed up on, I added fuel to the fire of my imagination.
It's been a while since Carlson called... Stop, Carlson. He's Oleg Brazerman, the arms dealer with whom we made a contract with the Africans. They were going to buy Weapons in Belarus: machine guns, pistols, more than 2 million rounds of ammunition for them, portable anti-aircraft systems, air defense radars, field kitchens and so on, right down to gas masks. A total of $72 million. Brazerman and I tied all the links together, the Africans signed a letter of intent, and now we were all waiting for the Africans to make the payment. Oleg and I were supposed to get 2% of the contract amount. Maybe that's why they're calling me, since the sale of the Weapons is directly supervised by the Committee? But we weren't acting in a way that bypassed them either. All in all, nothing but mysteries.
Katya volunteered to go with me. Well, not exactly with me, of course - we arrived earlier than scheduled and had breakfast in a nearby cafe, wondering about the reasons for the interest in me.
Our fears turned out to be in vain. The Chekists told me that the main fighter against carders, my old friend Colonel Novik from the "K" department, himself became a carder and is suspected of stealing money from other people's bank cards.
What news! I was overcome with joyful excitement. It was worth coming to the Committee for this.

Chapter 35
Adult
If you love, then with your whole being -
No matter what happens, you will think
Not about yourself, but always about him -
Yes, exactly: first of all about him,
About the one you love infinitely.
E. Asadov. If you love
I spent almost all my time with Katya, leaving for work only those few hours when she was at the institute or meeting with her friends. I forgot about friends and entertainment and began to look like a drug addict.
"Adult" made me money, but it didn't bring me pleasure. What is "adult"? Adult is adult porn. I don't think I need to explain to you what porn is. The pioneers of the porn industry were the Americans and Argentines. In fact, the history of pornography in the United States began along with the history of cinema: less than a year after the first film screening organized by the Lumiere brothers in Paris, in 1896, the three-minute film "The Kiss" was released on American screens. True, there was no porn in the film: actors John Rice and May Irwin kissed passionately on screen the entire time. By today's standards, a very modest occupation, nevertheless, the film was officially classified as pornographic production, and one authoritative reviewer called it "a demonstration of bestial lust that a civilized person cannot bear." The first traditional porn film with a known production date is the classic Argentine El Sartorio, where young bathers copulate with the devil. The first German porn was three years behind — the film Am Abend was released in 1910, becoming the first porn film in history to depict anal intercourse.
Today, the sale of porn content via the Internet is a well-established global industry with a turnover of $13-24 billion per year. The business is not public — hence the significant discrepancies. Experts agree on only one thing: in the last 30 years, revenues have only grown. If in 1970 the American porn market, the largest in the world, was estimated at only $10 million, then in 2000 its volume was already $12 billion. However, in recent years there has been a decline: customers are no longer interested in simply looking at “funny pictures” or watching porn films — they want action. That is why more and more adult webcams are appearing — “adult” webcams, where sexy beauties fulfill all the client’s whims in real time. Their job is to keep clients from Europe and the USA on the line for as long as possible, who pay from $2 to $10 per minute of connection, and how they will do it — caress themselves in front of the camera or tell jokes — is their business. About 40% of all “adult” webcams in the world work from the territory of Russia and the CIS countries.
So, how to start your own porn business on the Internet? The standard scheme is as follows: you upload a collection of pictures and videos to the site, announce the terms of access — a familiarization tour for a day for a couple of dollars or a monthly subscription for fifty. To process clients’ payments, you connect to a billing company. All online stores use the services of payment systems from plastic cards, but porn resources, as a rule, are serviced by specialized billing companies, for example, PayCom.
Where to get pictures and videos? Actually, webmasters buy the product from production studios - there are about thirty of them in Russia. For a good set (20-40 frames, one sexual act in progress) you will have to pay $100-250. According to an unwritten rule, Internet users do not communicate with content producers "live", only through the Network. It is not about the difference in mentalities. Filming porn is a hectic business, not very consistent with the criminal code. It is better not to get dirty.
The owner places the received materials on a paid website. The main consumer of such a product is a foreigner with a plastic card.
A separate and most numerous class of adult webmasters (AWM), in other words, sellers of pornography on the Internet - single people who do not have their own product, but attract visitors to other people's paid websites (in AWM terminology, they "drive traffic"). Most often, these enthusiasts create complex systems of free pages, each with a couple of pictures and an invitation to visit paid resources. For this activity, the sites pay their "agents" $2-3 thousand per person per month. There are 5-7 thousand such agents in Russia, and ten times more in the USA. "Think about it," one of my friends, who is no stranger to selling pornographic products via the Internet, told me. "For no reason at all, $2-3 thousand a month, and it's all legal - the entire world either loves porn masters or simply doesn't notice. This is not karting, where there are victims, police, and everything ends in prison. Here you don't steal anything - people pay for their own entertainment, and everyone is happy."
There was ironclad logic in his reasoning, and I wanted to try my hand at a field that was new to me. So I became AWM, swapping karting for porn. Only I earned not $2 thousand on this, but ten times more. How? The key to it all was spam.
"Spam" is an acronym, a compound abbreviation of the word. It was formed from the truncated spiced ham. In 1937, the American company Hormel Foods released canned meat from third-rate meat, which Americans did not want to buy. In order to sell the product, the owner of the corporation, Mr. Hormel, launched an aggressive marketing campaign, literally forcing this ham on American consumers. The advertising worked, and Hormel Foods began supplying its canned goods to the military departments and the navy. Even in post-war England, amidst the economic crisis, spam was a staple food for the British. So the word acquired the meaning of something disgusting, but inevitable.
The term "spam" in its new meaning (intrusive electronic mailing or "junk" mail) appeared in 1993. Usenet administrator Richard Depew wrote a program that, due to a bug, sent two hundred identical messages to one of the conferences. His dissatisfied interlocutors quickly found a suitable name for the intrusive messages - spam.
Today, spam is not only ham, it is also 90% of all e-mail. The threshold for entry into this business is low: I paid only $250 for sending 60 million “junk” letters via RealMailer or DMS Revolution. Of course, not all of these letters were delivered to the recipients - modern filters installed in companies or on free mail servers block 95-98% of spam, but in any case, each mailing attracted about 40 thousand unique users to my sites, about 250 of whom paid a monthly subscription to porn sites, which brought me an income of about $10 thousand. The costs of domains, RealMailer rental, web designer services, hosting, and a database of e-mail addresses of “strawberry” lovers amounted to about $2,500. The profitability of the business is over 300%. Every month I sent out about 250 million advertising letters.
Of course, it's not that simple: first, you had to get hold of the email addresses of people interested in pornography, since the days when you could regularly find offers like "Locomotive pickup from Irkutsk" in advertising letters are long gone. Today, spammers have become much more selective and prefer targeted (from the English "target") mailings intended for a specific target audience: for a porn lover - girls and Viagra, for a gambler - an invitation to a new online casino, for a gambling fan - a link to a betting pool, etc. Therefore, email databases had to be bought and protected like the apple of an eye - this is one of the most valuable assets. Who to buy from? From hackers, of course. Having long-standing connections in hacker circles, dating back to the days of CarderPlanet, I did not see any particular problem in this. Hackers hacked large porn resources and put their clients' databases up for sale, sometimes "in bulk" - by the megabyte. For a list of a million addresses I paid $500-1000. Sometimes I overpaid, often they tried to foist off complete junk on me, but after several mistakes I came to the only correct decision - to buy email address databases with online access to the hacked resource, which also allowed me to make at least daily updates.
Another difficulty was finding a quality hosting server for my websites, since many Internet users do not like to regularly clear their email boxes from advertising garbage, they begin to complain (in our language, "send abuses" - from English abuse - "exploitation with violation of rules") to special offices like SpamHaus, and the hosting "dies" with unenviable speed.
Accordingly, regular hosting for $15 per month is no good — we need hosting with a guarantee that it will not be closed after the first letter from an angry recipient of an advertising message. Where to look for such hosting? On spam and hacker forums, of course. There are enough services on the Internet that will organize a server for you for any needs. Do you want your own VPN? Here you go, already configured. Do you want a cheap server for some “fast” project and will not be offended if it is closed in two weeks? Here, a carded one, almost for free. Do you need a dedicated server with a guarantee that it will definitely not be closed? Keep a “dedicated server” in a “loyal” data center in Turkey, Malaysia or China, whose owners do not care what content their users post (even child pornography), and even more — they promise that they will not pay attention to complaints from visitors and other Internet providers. True, it is not cheap — from $1 thousand per month. You can rent a server for any purpose, without any reservations or dreadful agreements about what you can't do. Everything is allowed: drop projects, pornography, extremism and openly terrorist sites, exploits - everything. Hosting cost me $400 a month.
However, that's not all. Security programs filter out spam letters by characteristic words ("Viagra", "earnings", etc.), Internet links (often the same porn site is advertised in many mailings), and design style. In response, "junk" advertising gets "extra" letters, intentional mistakes in texts, and ads in the form of pictures. This is how spammers "break through" the filters of mail companies. Many other Internet projects also attract visitors using a scheme similar to "adult": casinos and betting (they pay up to 40% of the amount lost by the client you attracted), stores selling MP3s, ringtones, and pirated software. Many people willingly buy replicas - high-quality fakes of elite goods. Most often, these are pens and lighters (Dupont and Cartier), Swiss watches, bags and wallets (Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Prada), glasses and other luxurious, but counterfeit consumer goods, produced mainly in China. The high popularity of online pharmacies is due to the fact that a doctor's prescription is not required to buy antidepressants, steroids, Viagra and other potent drugs, which is especially important for American consumers (36 million Americans buy pills online). In addition, the cost of drugs in them is several times lower than in regular pharmacies. Illegal trade in drugs via the Internet is called "pharma" (from the English pharmacy). Online pharmacies collect orders and send them to India or China, where counterfeit production is located. Pharmaceutical spammers are responsible for two-thirds of the world's spam, with up to 40% coming from advertising just two drugs - Viagra and Cialis. According to closed sources, the turnover of the world's largest player in the pharmaceutical market, the Russian company Glavmed, was $120 million (its owner Igor Gusev was recently arrested).
When I was in prison last time, I tried to play the stock market - of course, not myself, but through trusted people I invested money in mutual investment funds (MIFs) of the Russian companies Troika Dialog and KIT Finance. Not much, only $20 thousand. Was I ready to lose it? No, that's why I didn't bet on one "horse": in Troika I bought shares of the Dobrynya Nikitich fund, and in KIT - shares of the Russian Oil and Russian Energy funds. Why did I invest in mutual funds? Because in the pre-trial detention center I did not have the opportunity to open my own brokerage account and independently trade shares online. Two days after I entered the market, the Russian stock index "sagged" by almost 30% and I lost one third of my savings at once. However, this did not upset me much, since I was investing for the long term and was confident that the market would soon recover.
And so it happened - in February 2008 (that is, twenty-two months later), already being free, I withdrew money from both management companies and after paying income tax was left with a profit of 25%. Inflation in Russia during this time was 18.1%. This is how I gained initial experience in playing the stock market, saved money and even earned a little.
After I started doing spam, the logical idea occurred to me to combine it with playing on the stock exchange. How?
A major criminal of the 19th century, Baron Daniel Drew, was a master of playing on the stock exchange. Wanting certain shares to be bought or sold, and their price to rise or fall, he almost never went straight to the goal. One of his tricks was to walk quickly through the hall of an elite club near Wall Street (so that it was obvious that he was heading to the stock exchange), take out his famous red handkerchief and wipe the sweat from his forehead. At the same time, a piece of paper would fall unnoticed. The club members, always trying to anticipate Drew's moves, would pounce on the note, expecting to find a stock market forecast in it. Rumors about the note's contents would quickly spread, and the club members would begin buying or selling shares according to a scenario that would benefit Drew.
Similar methods were used by unknown hackers who posted a message on the CNN news site about the death of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, as a result of which the "news" would end up in Chinese media, and from there on South Korean TV channels, which would cause the Seoul Stock Exchange index to fall by 1.5%. According to some estimates, the authors of this scam could have earned around $5 billion.
With the help of a mass Internet mailing, it is easy to manipulate the stock market, "secretly" reporting on the upcoming growth of shares of certain, most often small, companies. Why "small"? Because the market impact of individual transactions is especially great for illiquid securities. So-called pump-and-dump scams drive up stock prices by an average of 500%.
I did things a little differently. I would buy up shares of unknown software companies at rock-bottom prices. Then I would send out a mass mailing to convince consumers to buy the software. The selling would drive up the stock price, and I would sell my stake. Instead of writing directly to traders and tricking them into believing that a particular company could grow, I would use a manoeuvre sur les derrieres, as Napoleon called it, and create fundamental reasons for the stock to rise. Such strategies are always more effective. Pump-and-dumps are a major component of the spam industry, accounting for 15% of all spam.

Chapter 36
The Future of Spam
The barrage of "junk" advertising has given rise to a new industry — the development of anti-spam software. The usual confrontation between "armor" and "projectile" has begun. And if recently a significant share of spam could be eliminated by simply compiling a blacklist of addresses from which you do not want to receive e-mail, today random computers are used for mailings, each time new ones, from which entire networks of infected machines are created — botnets (botnet = robot network). A bot is a computer connected to the Internet, infected in such a way that spammers can use it for background mailing of "junk" mail without the owner's knowledge. Renting 3-5 thousand "zombie" computers costs from $300 to 3 thousand. Until recently, the largest botnet in the world was the Spanish Mariposa, which had 12.7 million (!) infected machines. According to FBI estimates, it was botnets that helped to significantly reduce the cost of mailings, bringing it to 5-10 per 1 million messages. Botnets can be used not only to send spam, inflate clicks, and download advertising and malware — due to their wide range of applications, they have become one of the main tools of cybercriminals. They can even be used to launch DDoS attacks — a popular way to explain to someone that they wrote something wrong on their site, be it a lesbian forum or a competitor’s site. Most often, such services are organized on the basis of a large, cheap botnet. As soon as the service owner presses a button, all of their bots from all over the world will start to break into one of the server’s cracks until it “falls” or until the hosting service cuts off its wire due to exceeding the traffic limit. Even such giants as Yahoo! ebay, buy.com, Amazon, and others have temporarily “fallen” from DDoS attacks. You can organize a simple DDoS attack yourself — using a browser and two… screwdrivers. You launch Internet Explorer (Microsoft's brainchild is still the most popular browser in the world), use one screwdriver to fix the Ctrl button, and the other one, F5. The number of requests per second that your browser sends can hinder the operation of a website and even prevent other people from visiting the same resource.
The level of expenses in the spam business is very small, so even in Russia there are hundreds of amateur spammers. However, there are no more than a dozen serious, highly professional groups of "garbage men" in the world, and seven of the top 10 spammers on the planet are from Russia, the largest of which advertises counterfeit Viagra. The United States, which was once the undisputed leader in the rating, is now not even in the top 20 countries-distributors. This is due to the active fight against botnets that has unfolded in the United States.
Today, advertisements are sent not only by mail - blogs, forums, social networks, instant messaging programs (ICQ) and mobile phones are used for this. Experts recently calculated that mobile spam is 125 thousand times more effective than traditional email. The emergence of botnets from smartphones is just around the corner. In addition, given the rate of expansion of Internet bandwidth and the development of online television, video spam will appear in a couple of years, and by 2015 it will become a big problem. And if you now think that regular spam is a problem, then imagine a 60-second Viagra ad with a frequency of 25 frames per second - today there is no technology that could stop it.
Although spam gave me a stable and fairly high income, it did not bring me pleasure: I had to sit at the computer day after day and come up with texts for thousands of advertising letters, update domains and website designs, keep sales statistics. This monotony irritated me. And over the years, I discovered that I should only do what brings satisfaction. Besides, “adult porn” was not my only source of income, which allowed me to gradually move away from online topics and concentrate on vodka production.

Chapter 37
Sonelao
“Let’s go somewhere to relax,” Sonelao, one of my oldest and most valuable clients, wrote to me on ICQ in early March.
“Why not,” I was happy with the opportunity to lie on the beach for a couple of weeks and flirt with local beauties. “But where? Brazil, Cuba, or maybe Italy?” I suggested my top 3 places I would like to visit.
“Let’s go to the Dominican Republic. I don’t think you need a visa there,” Sonelao suggested. “But let’s do it for sure, and not like last time, when I invited you to Thailand...”
“Bro, the only reason we didn’t see each other in Thailand was because I was jailed two months before the intended trip. But it’s for the best – what if a tsunami washed us away. Just in time for New Year and just in time for Pattaya… But we were honestly planning to come.
– You’re right, brat (I taught all my foreign partners Russian). So, I’m booking a hotel? Here are some photos, take a look.
The hotel looked pretty good in the photos.
– Just like last time, everything’s on me. You don’t have to take any money with you at all, – Sonelao continued to entice. – You can take your brother with you too…
– Okay, friend, we’ll think about it.
I have been working with Sonelao since 2004. The client is just a client, or rather, one of the best buyers of our dumps. According to him, an American of Thai origin, lived in California, drove a BMW "seven" and had a staff of drops, buying up stuff in huge quantities using counterfeit cards. He took dumps exclusively American, every month for $5-10 thousand. He did not ask for loans, he paid on time. Often on his own initiative he sent gifts: perfume, T-shirts, sunglasses and Pirelli calendars, which I collected. While I was in prison, Sonelao continued to communicate with my brother via the Internet.
- Dima, Sonya suggested flying to the Dominican Republic, - I wrote to my brother on ICQ. - For a couple of weeks, at his expense. Rum, cigars, sultry mulatto girls ...
- How safe is it for us? - Dima, as always, was brief. — He’s still our client and he’s not buying calendars…
— For me, I think, it’s normal. I’ve already served my time. But I don’t even know about you…
— Then I’m out. It’s better if we go somewhere without him a little later. We’ll take our chicks with us.
— Well, as you wish. I think I’ll agree.
— Sone, book a hotel. I’ll be able to fly out in two weeks, in mid-March, — I wrote that same evening, and then went to Google to find out if I needed a visa.
It turned out that Belarusians needed a visa to the Dominican Republic. The nearest embassy was in Moscow. I went to the store and bought a huge jar of black caviar and excellent Imperia vodka from Russian Standard as a gift for Sonelao.
— Bro, I’m flying to Moscow tomorrow to get a visa, — I told the American a few days later. — Book plane tickets for March 15–17. My last name is…, passport series is…
— Sergey, here’s the thing… — my interlocutor suddenly hesitated. — My passport has expired, and I have to wait 3-4 weeks until I get a new one.
— No, brat, that won’t do. I definitely won’t wait. I’m already ready for the holidays, so I’ll go no matter what — with or without you.
— Where, to the Dominican Republic? — the question immediately followed.
— I haven’t decided yet. But I doubt it’s to the Dominican Republic — I don’t have that much free money right now, everything is invested in various projects.
— Money is not a problem, — my friend said. — How much do you need?
— As you wish. And I’ll send you dumps for that amount later, — I answered.
Sonelao transferred me $2 thousand, and on March 20, my brother Dima, Katya, and her friend Anya Korneva and I flew to Egypt.
* *
One of the best and most convenient travel agencies for traveling to Egypt, and around the world, is Tez Tour (teztour.com). Excellent service, meeting at the airport, hotel accommodation, insurance, friendly guides who speak Russian and English well, who quickly resolve any issues that arise during your vacation.
We were flying from Kiev to Sharm el-Sheikh, for exactly a week. The Arabs call their city Sharm el-Sheikh ("Sheikh's Bay"), and only in Russian is the name Sharm el-Sheikh found.
"Just watch out," Katya warned me after a mustachioed border guard in an unusual uniform with lots of stripes, emblems, and bright shoulder straps with eagles and huge, marshal-like stars, slapped entry visas into our passports, "here, Arabs offer camels for women. They've done it for me more than once. Either they're joking, or they're serious. One camel costs five grand.
" "Hmm, offer me a thousand camels, and I might agree...," I answered seriously.
"I'll agree with you!"
The city is located in the practically windless Naama Bay. The construction of the resort began with this bay, so it is the most inhabited and well-appointed of all. The tour cost us an astronomical $1,300 per person, which for Egypt, which you can visit for about three hundred dollars on a last-minute tour, was very expensive. True, the hotel - Maritim Jollie Ville Resort & Casino, located 12 kilometers from the airport, directly on the shore of the Red Sea, was worth it. Five restaurants, bars, two outdoor pools - one heated, the other - with sea water, a SPA center, a beautiful park, four tennis courts, horse riding, diving, surfing, a golf course five kilometers from the hotel and, most importantly, its own sandy beach, since along the entire coast of Sharm, with the exception of a few beaches, you must enter the water in special shoes, because coral reefs begin right at the shore.
In addition, our hotel was located in the very center of the "Promenade" - the famous promenade of Naama Bay, which is often called the Arab Las Vegas. Life here is in full swing around the clock: souvenir shops, shopping centers, discos, entertainment venues, bowling, restaurants, bars and casinos. Little Buddha is also located here - the most fashionable club in Sharm el-Sheikh. During the day, this is a restaurant where you can try the most delicious dishes of French, Mediterranean, Japanese and Asian cuisine. Closer to midnight, Little Buddha turns into a stylish nightclub, where the most famous DJs from all over the world often perform. Pacha Club & Bus Stop is another famous place in Sharm. The legendary club of the same name opened in Ibiza in 1973 and became a dance Mecca for all visitors to the island. Now it is an extensive network with branches in all corners of the world. The symbol of the club is two cherries, the personification of the sweet and beautiful life. Right opposite Pacha Club is the best hookah bar in Sharm el-Sheikh.
Our hotel did not have all inclusive. The price of the trip included only breakfast and dinner.
- Damn it! And you chose a hotel without all inclusive, - Katerina scolded. - What are we going to eat for lunch?
— Honey, you don’t understand something: there’s nothing wrong with the fact that there’s no all-inclusive here, since the “all-inclusive” system usually has one single exception — quality is excluded. Buy a cheap package and you’ll have to pay extra fees, the hotel will be worse, the sea will be further away, the service and food will be worse. As a result, your impressions will be spoiled, and you’ll only have saved $200–300, — I explained to my friend.
— But you still want to eat, — she continued to press her point. — Let’s go look for a cafe on the beach.
A bottle of regular Nestle drinking water cost $2 on the beach, and in a store literally a hundred meters away — only 50 cents. We also found a restaurant, and not just one. True, a decent lunch would cost about thirty dollars per person, and we weren’t ready for such expenses. Of course, you could buy groceries at the supermarket and have lunch in your room (we did that a couple of times), but we only had a gluttony during the first few days, and then during the day we either slept — it was impossible to sunbathe anyway — or made love in our rooms, and the lunch problem disappeared by itself.
You can bring alcohol with you — I grabbed some Empire vodka, which I bought as a gift for Sonelao, or you can buy it at the local Duty Free, located just a few meters from Jollie Ville.
— My friend, do you have your passport with you? — a salesman in one of the souvenir shops, where we went to check Dima’s VISA, which for some reason was not accepted by Egyptian ATMs, asked me in good Russian.
— No, why not?
— I wanted to ask you to buy me some vodka at the duty free. It’s a Muslim country, you understand — they don’t sell to Arabs…
— Oh, so you drink too?! — Dima was amused. — I thought you only smoked hashish.
— You know, comrade, — I looked at the Arab, — I have a better idea: in the refrigerator in my room there is a bottle of the best vodka in the world, “Russian Standard” — have you heard? Let me just… give it to you.
The merchant did not immediately believe in his own luck, but when we approached the gates of our hotel and I brought him a bottle of vodka, still covered in frost, fresh from the freezer, he shook my hand for a long, long time: “Thank you, thank you, friend.”

Chapter 38
You Can Remain Silent
An arrest is a blinding flash and a blow from which the present is immediately shifted into the past, and the impossible becomes a full-fledged present; it is a sharp night bell or a rude knock on the door; it is the gallant entrance of the unwiped boots of awake operatives; it is — behind their backs a frightened, nailed witness.
A traditional arrest is also about gathering things with trembling hands for the person being taken away: a change of clothes, a piece of soap, some food, and no one knows what is needed, what is allowed and how best to dress, and the operatives rush and interrupt: “You don’t need anything. They’ll feed you there. It’s warm there.” (Everyone lies. And they rush you – for fear.)
A. Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago
Ding-ding-ding — the insistent trill of the doorbell broke into my sleep. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock: 6 am. Damn, who showed up so early?! Maybe Katya? Although she has her own keys. I went to the door:
- Who's there?
- The cleaning lady, - a female voice answered.
- What do you want? - I looked through the peephole: sure enough — a woman with a mop.
- Take away the boxes, they're getting in the way of my work.
"What the hell boxes?" I thought to myself, but for some reason I clicked the lock on the front door. Instead of a frail woman in a blue uniform, four burly young men were standing on the threshold. The transforming cleaning lady herself was nowhere to be found. And where were they hiding that I didn't notice them?
Oh, right — behind the wall on the right, you can't even see them through the peephole. And I've been meaning to replace it with a modern one with a wide viewing angle for a long time. I tried to close the door, but it was immediately intercepted by a strong hand in a black leather glove. Damn, there’s no chain on the door either… How many times have I read on carding forums, and I’ve written something like this myself: “From a security point of view, your apartment should be a fortress. If you don’t have a second iron door, install one. A chain that prevents the door from opening wide, a video camera so that no one can hide behind the wall — all of this will come in handy. While the police are breaking down your door, you’ll have time to format your disk twenty times or call a lawyer,” and now you’ve screwed up like that…
“The State Security Committee,” one of the guests introduced himself. “Here’s a warrant for a search in connection with the July 3 explosion in Minsk.” July
3, Independence Day… During the celebration, a homemade bomb filled with steel balls exploded in the crowd. There were no casualties, but more than fifty people were injured. And where was I that day? Ah, I remembered: in Gomel, we were drinking at a friend’s dacha. So there’s an alibi – lots of witnesses.
“Can I see your ID?” I asked a tall, cropped security officer in a black leather jacket.
“Yes, please,” he took a red ID card with the golden inscription “Commander of the State Security Committee” out of his pocket and handed it to me. Colonel Chuchko,” I read in the booklet.
“Everything’s fine, go ahead and search,” I said, went into the kitchen, took a bottle of champagne out of the refrigerator, filled a glass and drank it slowly.
One of the operatives went to get the witnesses. He was gone for about fifteen minutes – normal people are still asleep at 6 a.m. The cops often conduct searches and detentions at night or early in the morning, when you’re torn from the warmth of your bed and are half-asleep and unable to adequately perceive reality. Finally, they brought one of the neighbors.
- Before conducting the search, I suggest that you voluntarily hand over the instruments of the crime, large sums of money, the weapon, drugs and other items prohibited for storage, - Colonel Chuchko, apparently the senior in the group, suggested to me. - Let's formalize all this in an act of voluntary surrender - it will be taken into account in court, if anything.
"Yeah, it'll count..." I thought to myself. "This will definitely be the last thing that will help me," and said out loud:
"There is nothing forbidden in my house. And I have nothing to do with your explosion, I was not even in Minsk that day.
" "Do you know Oleg Brazerman?" the question immediately followed.
"I know. We were working on selling the Weapon to Africa. But it was all official there, through your company, Belspetsvneshtechnika. And what's the point of this whole circus with the search, if I'm coming to you myself and helping with the investigation?.."
* *
I got in touch with the Committee by chance. When Colonel Novik, the first deputy head of the "K" department, was detained in the fall of 2007, the security officers called me and asked if I could help with the investigation, and I, a sinful man, immediately agreed. Moreover, he not only testified against Novik and Miklashevich, another colonel from this department, but also (which was definitely not worth doing) presented a compromising dictaphone recording of them, which was waiting in the wings on my computer. What was I thinking? Why did I get involved in a war that wasn’t my own and use serious incriminating evidence so ineptly? There is truly no limit to human stupidity. Then they called me again, but I said that I was going on vacation and would be back in a few weeks.
“Okay, guys,” Chuchko interrupted my recollections, “get to work,” he ordered his men.
“Just roll up your sleeves, please,” I intervened, “otherwise something might ‘accidentally’ fall out of them, a bullet or a check of heroin, God forbid. And let’s not wander around the apartment, but inspect room by room – witnesses, keep an eye on this. Okay?”
Oddly enough, there were no objections.
Of course, they didn’t find anything illegal or related to the explosion in my house. However, it seemed to me that the “guests” weren’t trying to look for anything, and the whole show with the search was nothing more than a formality for them – half of Minsk fell under that comb at the time.
“Now let’s look through the contents of your computer,” the young blond operative sat down at my laptop and looked at me questioningly, as if asking for the password to log in to Windows.
I froze in indecision: should I say it or not?
“Okay then,” I figured that there was nothing of interest to the KGB on my computer, sat down at the keyboard and typed in the code.
My God! I couldn’t believe my eyes: two crypts were open.
Usually, I only left the one where ICQ was hanging out, but today – for the first and only time – the main encrypted disk was also turned on. Damn it! What kind of bad luck is this?! As luck would have it, they came for me today. Yeah, Polisdog relaxed, life became well-fed and calm, he lost his caution - and there you have the result.
The cops were rubbing their hands with satisfaction, rummaging through the directories, smiling like children, and copying the contents of both cryptocontainers to drive C. They did everything I needed, and had no idea what an unpleasant surprise awaited them: my computer had the Deep Freeze program installed, which restored the system drive to its original state after each reboot, and now all that needed to be done was to reboot Windows under some pretext.
“Hey,” I stopped the blond guy, who had already turned off my laptop and was now about to disconnect the external hard drive from it, “you can’t disconnect it like that, it might burn out. You need to disconnect it correctly from under Windows...”
“Do it,” he agreed surprisingly easily.
“That’s great, the trick worked,” I thought to myself. — I’d like to see your faces when you proudly return to the department, gather your bosses and colleagues around you, turn on your laptop (I gave you the password for Windows) — and there’s a naked Wasser
inside.” — So, are you done with the computer? — Colonel Chuchko asked the “nerd.”
— Yes, yes, we’re taking it with us, — he quickly answered. — For further study, — he enunciated syllable by syllable.
— Okay, then you two, — the colonel pointed at the blond and another young operative, — go to the department, and we’ll go and search his mother’s house outside the city.
Half an hour later, Chuchko, I, and another security officer — a young man who looked no older than twenty, were already in Gatovo, a village ten minutes’ drive from the Moscow Ring Road, where my mother lived.
— Sergey, we know there’s nothing to search here, — said the senior KGB officer, — but we have warrants to conduct searches in two places, so please go get the witnesses. Arkady, — he looked at his partner, — while he writes up the report, sign it and we’ll go.
I called the neighbors downstairs, we quickly settled the paperwork and were about to leave the apartment when Chuchko’s phone rang. As he listened, his facial expression changed several times and froze in a grimace of extreme discontent and surprise.
— What passwords for the cryptocontainers? — he croaked, looking at me.
— I don’t remember, — when I realized that Deep Freeze had worked like clockwork, I began to speak to the KGB in a completely different language. — I changed it yesterday when I was drunk, I wrote it down somewhere, but I don’t remember where.
— Okay, let's "lock" you up for ten days to start, maybe you'll remember...
I quickly scrolled through the contents of my encrypted disks in my head: ICQ without saved message history, VISA Interchange Directory — a database for determining the card type and bank by "bin", hundreds of millions of email addresses of "porn" lovers, several ready-made showcase sites for "adult", sales statistics, a file with a list of debtors, contacts, a couple of porn films with my favorite actress Angel Dark — well, that seems to be all, nothing interesting, certainly not for the KGB.
— Okay, write it down, — I dictated the passwords to the disks to Chuchko.
He immediately dialed someone’s number — apparently the one who had called him a few minutes ago — and gave me my codes. Apparently, what he heard satisfied his invisible interlocutor, because we locked the apartment, got into the car and drove to the KGB.
— Well, Sergey, — Arkady turned to me when I was sitting at the table in his office, — let’s formalize the interrogation as a witness in the explosion case? It’s just a simple formality. You don’t know anything about it, do you?
— Guessed — I don’t know. And where is my laptop?
— What do you mean where?! At the neighbors’…
— What neighbors?! — a terrible guess distorted my face.
— Well, at the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
— What do you mean at the Ministry of Internal Affairs?! — I was completely dumbfounded by the surprise.
- Well, - Arkady, who, as it turned out, was a KGB investigator with the rank of captain, threw up his hands, - very simple. There were four of us who came to see you, right?
I nodded.
- Chuchko and I are from the Committee, and the other two are from Department "K". We don't need your computer, they are the experts there...
Damn! What a fool I am. They fooled you like a first-grader... And why didn't I look at the IDs of all the operatives who were present at the search? Now it's clear why they didn't really search my house: the cops only wanted my computer, and the security officers didn't give a damn about anything - they knew that I wasn't the one who planted the bomb. Maybe they blew it up themselves...
- You really crossed the cops in some way, - the investigator continued, - the operation against you was personally coordinated by the Minister of Internal Affairs Naumov.
"In some way, I crossed the path of Department "K"... Of course: I testified against two employees and presented incriminating evidence, helped to expose other "werewolves" from the same department... Apparently, they caught wind of the cops - which is not surprising given their capabilities - so here you have the result. You've played too much, PoliceDog. You relied on the decency of the KGB agents, who knew that you were helping them with the investigation, and therefore turned a blind eye to minor crime, traces of which can always be found on your computer...
- You can only lie to the woman you love and a policeman... - Arkady seemed to read my thoughts.
- What are you talking about?
- You need to tell the truth to everyone else, - he finished. - I was talking about your passwords.
- Well, what is, is. I was slow, of course... By the way, what's your last name? - I asked the captain. - Have we crossed paths before?
- Shardakov. Arkady Shardakov. I am friends with Ivan Muravyov, a presenter from one of the TV channels, and he knows you. Don't blame yourself, he continued, if you hadn't told me the passwords yourself, we would have injected you with sodium thiopental ('truth serum') - you would have told me even worse.
- Your methods are great, nothing to say... It's not far to Guantanamo, I summed up gloomily.
- What do you need the Anarchist Cookbook and programs for calculating the mass of TNT in a directed explosion for? - Shardakov suddenly changed the subject. - The cops said they found it on your computer...
- Brotherman dragged it from somewhere. I looked - it was very curious. So I left it. Just in case, so to speak. And the book is real - not that low-grade fake about making drugs from banana peels that is lying around on the Internet.
- Curiosity has ruined more virgins than love... - the captain noted philosophically. - You could be charged with terrorism any minute, for such "literature"... Okay, sign the interrogation report and let's go.
- Where to? - I looked at him in fear and turned my gaze to the window overlooking the KGB courtyard.
— I'll hand you over to the cops...
* *
The Ministry of Internal Affairs was located on Gorodskoy Val Street, just a two-minute walk from the huge yellow monster with white columns — the KGB building.
— Who are you? — a police major greeted us unfriendly in the lobby of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
— Pavlovich...
Shardakov left.
— Take off your chain, pendant, glasses, get everything out of your pockets, money and mobile phones on the table, — the major commanded, with each new word further depriving me of hope of escaping from here. — Don't forget your belt and shoelaces.
Now that's all for sure. Repin's painting "Here We Are". You should have thought earlier, Seryozha, when you gave out your passwords.
— Will you give all this to my mother? — I asked.
— Except for the phones. Write a statement addressed to the investigator.
— Who is the investigator? — I asked curiously.
— Belsky...
I took a pen and wrote. In two copies. And when, 20 minutes later, this same Belsky showed up — a short, stocky, high-browed investigator of about thirty — I handed him both copies of the statement and asked him to sign the list of my personal belongings.
— What for? — he was surprised.
— Just in case. Last time, your employees stole almost two rubles’ worth of all sorts of stuff from my car. They didn’t even disdain to take the perfume I had started. Damn Holodomors! And call my mother, phone +37529… — let her send my lawyer — Elena Pavlovna Shevchenko.
— Okay, — the high-brow agreed with everything.
The lawyer arrived an hour later. Even with my developed imagination, I couldn’t imagine that the short, slightly plump middle-aged woman standing in front of me was the thirty-five-year-old and still pretty Lena Shevchenko.
— Uh-uh, where’s Lena? — I asked the woman.
- She left the bar and works as a judge. She recommended your mother to hire me - we are from the same consulting office. Although you understand that lawyers in our country...
- Vote or not, you will still get... - I said a phrase similar in meaning.
- That's right - they don't decide anything, - the lawyer finished her thought.
Thus, a new character appeared in my life - a lawyer from the Partizansky District Law Firm of the Hero City of Minsk, Marina Mikhailovna Vorobyova - a simple, heavy-smoking woman in her early forties, who has long since lost all illusions about the state of law in our country and therefore soberly assessed the prospects of my criminal case.
- Everything is clear to me now, - she said. - I'll see you when you're at Volodarka.
The lawyer said goodbye and left, breaking yet another thread connecting me with freedom. The cops put me in the official "six", and we headed to my apartment for a second search, this time exclusively by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
This search was not much different from many other searches that have taken place in my life and will still take place in the life of every active Belarusian, regardless of whether he is involved in crime, business or politics.
— We'll draw up a search report now — the blond man, whom I had involuntarily met that morning, told me, — and in the meantime, pack what you need to take to the pretrial detention center.
To the pretrial detention center... Hmm... It's a terrible thing to pack for jail yourself. It's one thing to be "received" on the street: face down on the asphalt, lying there, not moving. "You can remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in court." It's quite another to be in your own apartment with three cops, realizing that arrest is inevitable, that you're practically already in custody, and pack for jail yourself. Luckily, the cops were more or less humane and gave me enough time to pack.
A tracksuit, a knitted cap, gloves, a down jacket (options: a long sheepskin coat, a padded jacket) - it will come in handy for lying on the floor in cold cells of pretrial detention centers and prisons, several pairs of warm socks, thermal underwear (or regular long johns), worse shoes - the controllers in the pretrial detention center don't give a damn that your boots cost three of his monthly salaries - they will take the insoles out of them anyway, a towel, soap, toilet paper, a toothbrush and toothpaste, pens, notebooks, envelopes, a wristwatch, tea, coffee, candy, chocolate, sugar, bouillon cubes, a bottle of water, a couple of blocks of cigarettes, matches, a plastic mug, a plate, a spoon, a kettle, medicine - painkillers, for a runny nose and stomach, a photo of your beloved as a keepsake, a last note "I love you. No matter what happens", and off you go. God forbid, several years long...
Do you want to know what happens next? Everything is as usual: a visit to the prosecutor, with whom I was unable to talk personally this time, an arrest warrant, the gray damp walls of the pre-trial detention center with a "fur coat" on the walls, designed to put pressure on your psyche and long banned in the entire civilized world, dim light, rats and hordes of bedbugs turning your body into a giant "smorgasbord"... Oh, if only I could turn into a mosquito and fly far, far away. Fly to my grandfather... I wonder how long mosquitoes live?

Chapter 39
Who is Mr Gonzalez?
— Who is Albert Gonzalez? — Vorobyova’s lawyer began instead of greeting me when I stepped over the door of the investigation office.
— What date is it today? — I answered a question with a question, as the holder of an Israeli passport.
— August 8, 2008, — the lawyer said, confused, not understanding where I was going with this.
— So, it turns out that I’ve been here for eight days already… Hello, Marina Mikhailovna.
— Well, you remembered my name, — she complimented me.
— Treat me to a cigarette — I wasn’t allowed to take one with me from the house.
— They don’t even smoke in the offices here, I go to the toilet myself. This isn’t Volodarka.
— I would say, “Unfortunately, this isn’t Volodarka”…
— By the way, why are you here in Zhodino and not in Minsk? I saw a letter from the investigator addressed to Dubrovsky, the head of SIZO-1, where he asked to leave you in the capital...
- At first, the cops planned it that way, but then, as one of my acquaintances at Volodarka whispered to me in secret, "they read the letters confiscated from you, saw that you were having a good time here, and decided to take you far away from the city to tie your hands and feet." The official wording: "No investigative actions involving Pavlovich are planned for the next two months. In addition, in order to prevent him from meeting Novik and Boyankov, I ask..." That's how I ended up here, in Minsk Regional Prison No. 8.
- So who the hell is Gonzalez?
- What the hell Gonzalez?!
- Your accomplice.
- My, excuse me, who? - I stared questioningly at the lawyer.
- Accomplice, co-conspirator, buddy - call it what you want, the meaning is the same.
— An accomplice... I don't remember him...
— You'd better read what they write about you, — Vorobyova took a stack of newspapers smelling of fresh printing ink from her briefcase and handed them to me.
I quickly ran my eyes over the text of the articles. So, he was born in Miami to a family of Cuban immigrants. Little Albert got his first computer when he was eight years old. The Internet was just starting to appear back then. At nine, Albert already knew how to fight computer viruses. He didn't go to parties or play football with his friends, he always sat at the computer. The computer was his best friend. Over time, their son's hobby began to worry his parents. "His mother would put him to bed, and at one or two in the morning she would find him at the computer again." When Gonzalez turned seventeen, he and two of his classmates used school computers and hacked into the Indian government's computer network. At that time, it did not occur to them to rob the Republic of India, and they limited themselves to leaving mocking comments on the government website, ridiculing the local culture. "Suddenly, the FBI showed up at the school and demanded our computers," recalls its principal, Thomas Shaw. Gonzalez was rashly not jailed, but simply banned from going near a computer for six months.
In 1999, he graduated from high school with honors and moved to New York. Under the nickname SoupNazi, taken from the comedy series Seinfeld, he met people in Internet chat rooms who would later become his accomplices. And four years later, he began hacking computer networks on the East Coast of America on his own.
Gonzalez was arrested in 2003 by the US Secret Service, but he did not want to go to prison, even an American resort one, and agreed to help the feds carry out Operation Firewall, aimed at the site Shadowcrew.com, which was known as a "supermarket of cybercrime." At the same time, Gonzalez continued to install spyware on other people's computers.
Let's move on, Alexander Suvorov. He grew up in the small town of Sillamae in northeastern Estonia. He graduated from high school there in 2002.
Sillamae is a rather specific city, which was closed during the Soviet era. There was a "mailbox" there - an enterprise of the military-industrial complex. And the contingent of city residents was formed accordingly - mostly from highly qualified engineering and technical personnel. Therefore, it is no coincidence that many representatives of the younger generation of Sillamae residents show extraordinary abilities in the exact sciences.
"A typical "C" student. He did not stand out among his classmates with any special abilities, but he studied quite well. We did not notice any special attraction to either the exact sciences or the computer in him," one of his former teachers said about Alexander Suvorov. "By nature, he was quite calm. Sometimes he could flare up, but he did not hold a grudge against anyone for a long time. An absolutely normal boy."
Immediately after graduating from the gymnasium, Suvorov left Sillamae and almost never appeared in his hometown again. He rarely communicated with his former classmates. There were rumors that Suvorov became a hacker, but no one really knew anything.
This year, Gonzalez was among 11 people (including three Ukrainians and one Belarusian) charged by federal prosecutors with conspiracy, computer hacking, fraud, and trading in stolen credit and debit card numbers. At the time, it was the largest such case in the United States. It was announced at a news conference in Boston attended by Attorney General Michael Mukasey and the chief prosecutor for the Eastern District of New York, Benton Campbell, who represented the prosecution in both 1996 trials of Vyacheslav “Yaponchik” Ivankov.
The attackers chose potential victims from among the companies included in the Fortune 500 list of the world's largest corporations, studied the payment and security systems of the companies, and then hacked their networks. Albert Gonzalez also traveled with his laptop to cities in the United States, trying to penetrate the computer networks of stores using a special program. Gonzalez searched for technically vulnerable computer networks through the Wi-Fi wireless Internet system. If he succeeded, he copied bank card data (credit card numbers, PIN codes and account information) from his computer to servers located in the United States, the Netherlands, Latvia and Ukraine. Later, investigators found more than 41 million bank card numbers on these two servers. In total, the hackers managed to steal data from 170 million debit and credit cards. According to court documents, the bulk of the data, concerning approximately 130 million cards, was stolen from the Heartland Payment Systems payment system. In comparison, the Hannaford Brothers supermarket chain had data on 4.2 million cards stolen. The hackers sold some of the stolen data on the black market, and used some themselves: they put the information on blank plastic cards and used them to “withdraw” tens of thousands of dollars from ATMs.
The Americans also knew Gonzalez’s closest accomplices: Kharkiv resident Maksim Yastremsky, known in hacker circles as Maksik, and an Estonian of Slavic origin, Alexander Suvorov (JonnyHell).
On March 3, 2008, 24-year-old Suvorov was arrested in Frankfurt on his way to Bali and is awaiting extradition to the United States. Suvorov’s arrest, as described by the Hamburg weekly Der Spiegel, looks quite spectacular. When he handed over his Estonian passport at the passenger check-in counter, two casually dressed men came out of the line and showed their service IDs: “You are under arrest.” Following this, two special agents named Paul B. and Timothy G. took him to the prison in Weiterstadt, a few kilometers south of Frankfurt am Main.
In America, the success of the Secret Service detectives did not go unnoticed. After all, the young Estonian, under the pseudonym Johnny Hell, belongs, according to ABC, to "the world's largest community of fraudsters who trade stolen credit card numbers around the world."
In Germany, the case of the arrest of a dangerous international fraudster became a topic of discussion in the highest circles of politics and justice. After all, both agents of the American Secret Service (they worked at the US Consulate General in Frankfurt and had diplomatic passports) carried out the arrest on German territory without any right to do so.
The German justice system also found itself in a tricky situation, having to decide whether to extradite Suvorov to the US authorities, since at the time of his arrest his identity was not listed in the German intelligence service databases. The saving grace was a copy of a fax with an arrest warrant, allegedly issued by the Californian authorities in early February. The Germans doubted the authenticity of the document. That same night, an electronic message arrived from Washington to Frankfurt, stating that the “preliminary” arrest warrant was currently being “translated” into German. The overseas “translators” managed to complete this work only by March 12. In other words, the arrest warrant was delivered to Frankfurt am Main a week after the arrest itself. The document spoke of “hacking corporate databases containing millions of credit card numbers.” The damage, as estimated by the authors of the warrant, exceeds $100 million.
On a tip from the Americans, Kharkiv resident Yastremsky was arrested in July 2007 in Turkey, where he was vacationing. His namesake, Israeli Maksym Turchak, was also taken with him. However, Turchak was quickly released due to lack of evidence. At the same time, reports emerged that Maksym Yastremsky was allegedly working for the international terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. These reports caused such a strong resonance that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine had to make an official statement refuting rumors about Yastremsky's cooperation with Islamist terrorists.
It is significant that many of the affected companies did not even know that they had leaked data (the TJX chain of stores lost 45.6 million credit cards, and hackers had access to all the information in real time for seventeen months). TJX has a market value of $13 billion, but the company has failed to implement additional security measures. Now it is counting its losses - according to TJX itself, they amount to about $256 million. Forrester Research analysts are confident that this figure will quadruple over time and exceed $1 billion. At the same time, absolutely all experts admit that TJX's real expenses are almost impossible to calculate.
Most of the members of the criminal group were engaged in selling stolen data and had never met in person.
According to the US federal prosecutor's office, Albert Gonzalez's property is valued at $1.65 million, he owns a house in Miami and a 2006 BMW.
- "Among them are three Ukrainians and one Belarusian," the lawyer repeated. - It turns out that Gonzalez is your accomplice. Well, or you are his ... - she added.
- It turns out that way, - I sighed. — I thought I was selling Johnnyhelle dumps, but it turns out the goods were from Gonzalez...
— Do Americans really work THAT way? — Vorobyova circled the paragraph about Suvorov's arrest in Germany with a pencil.
— That's just the tip of the iceberg. Von Voa, one of the most famous carders in the world, has been under investigation in the States since 2003, and only God knows when the trial will take place.
— I thought it was only here… — my lawyer didn't seem to have a very high opinion of our judicial system.
— The legal chaos in America is even worse. When the country's economic security is at stake, they don't care about the letter of the law at all. The interests of the United States of America are sacred and must be protected by any means necessary, preferably (but not necessarily) under a democratic sauce.
I didn't know Maksik personally, but I once bought a re-glued Ukrainian passport from him. A lousy one, by the way. So Yastremsky began his criminal career with document forgery.
— When he was arrested, they found two passports in different names, and his laptop contained 5,000 credit cards and programs for hacking networks…
— Hmm… The first rule of a spy: you can't have two documents that are mutually exclusive.
— Suvorov, Yastremsky and Gonzalez called their enrichment plan Get rich or die trying…
— “Get rich or die trying!” is a famous slogan of the rapper 50cent.
— Do you get letters?
— Yes, yesterday from my mother. Have you seen the investigator?
— Only on the phone. He said he wasn’t planning on coming to you yet. He advised me to follow the news about your case in the press and on the Internet. By the way, I dug up an official press release about your adventures, — Vorobyova handed me several sheets of paper fastened with a pin. — I found it on the website of the American Department of Justice, — she added proudly.
— Okay, I have to go, — Marina Mikhailovna got up from the table and began to collect her papers. — I’ll try to help you. Or rather, I’ll do everything in my power — your case is not the most ordinary. Besides, it’s under the control of the Prosecutor General’s Office. Mom will give you something to eat now, she and Katya are waiting for me in the car.
- Okay. Say hello to them. See you later, - I said goodbye and left.
Prison cops are distinguished by some special narrow-mindedness. For them, every densely populated building is always called a "Shanghai", and a barracks standing apart from the others is often called a "farm". The building where I was sitting was called the "Titanic" - either because of its gigantic size, or because we were all doomed to go to the bottom ...
I returned to the cell, having first walked 400 meters along tangled underground corridors separated by dozens of iron doors, lay down on the bunk and closed my eyes. I found myself where I always wanted to be ...

Chapter 40
He who has more rights is right
It's already late. My eyes are starting to hurt from the monitor, but I keep looking at your photos. In them, you look as beautiful as you do in real life, but not alive. In real life, you are completely different. A warm bundle of happiness... Such a strange feeling... I feel a year younger... I live last fall... My track list in the player has changed to the music I was listening to when we met, and now even the sounds, smells, and sensations have become the same as then... The only thing that is constantly changing is that I am falling more and more in love with you every day. With your gentle hands, dark skin, your seriousness and at the same time sweet childishness... And also... also... Lord, how I miss you!!! It's as if my oxygen has been cut off and my life has been put on pause... I will never leave you. I will never let things slide. You are the most precious thing I have. The closest and dearest. And I am not afraid of any downpours, thunderstorms, hurricanes, snow, if you are next to me. So that I can always bury my face in your warm, dear shoulder and feel safe... I beg you - do not lose heart. Whatever. You are strong. I believe in you and I believe in you. All my poems are only about you... and thoughts... and dreams... And even in the noise of the rain I hear your voice...
From Katya's letter
A tedious and unbearably long streak of inactive days dragged on, identical as photocopies. When this happened the first time, I knew what I was in prison for, I was wanted by six special services around the world, had more than 20 thousand victims and was in prison for what I did. Now everything was more like a nightmare that just won't go away, no matter how much I pinch myself.
The other day I sent a complaint to the Prosecutor General's Office. He wrote that since my laptop was not packed or sealed during the search with the signatures of the suspect and attesting witnesses, any information extracted from it should be considered evidence obtained in violation of the procedure established by the Criminal Procedure Code. And such evidence cannot have legal force.
“You know, I’m only just beginning to understand that I’ve never loved anyone so much,” Katya wrote to me in one of her letters. “It’s so nice to realize that you live for one person who is more precious than anything else in the world… It’s so hard to find “the one”… and I was lucky… it means that fate does love me, since it sends me such gifts… And what’s happening now is simply justice taking a vacation in August”…
Apparently, justice went on vacation for a long time – in September I was still in the pretrial detention center, and no visible changes occurred.
When you go to prison, you lose many of your usual things: your phone, your watch, comfortable clothes, etc. And that’s why you feel serious psychological discomfort. Recently, my mother gave me my favorite Longines watch, my usual home jeans, a sweater, Katya’s photo, and a scarf — the very one that Katya knitted for me last New Year. It smelled of her Escada. A trifle, you say? But prison lacks vivid impressions, the main thing here is not how much and what they give you, but the feeling of not being abandoned, news from the outside, and any sign of attention can lift your spirits for a long time.
A couple of days ago, I received a response to my complaint. They wrote that “the confiscated laptop was not packed or sealed, since there was a need for an immediate inspection of the information contained in it. In this regard, immediately after the search was completed, investigator of the UKGB for the city of Minsk and the Minsk region A. A. Shardakov arrived at his office, where he examined the information contained in the confiscated laptop. After that, the laptop was packed and sealed”…
The gloomy walls kill my ability to feel, touch, see. You turn into a biorobot: you eat when necessary, smoke to distract yourself for a while, and wait… Here you are always waiting for something: walks, parcels, the investigator, the lawyer, letters… And Katya rarely writes… The snoring of my cellmates irritates me more and more every day. Chairs made of steel. Beds made of steel. Doors made of steel. My nerves are tired - they are not made of steel…
Yesterday, already falling asleep, I thought about suicide for the first time. I lay in the dark, and there were tears in my eyes. I imagined to whom and what I would write in my last letter. The coffin must be white. The black suit. An inconsolable (or perhaps already indifferent to everything) widow. A projector showing my lifetime photos on the entire wall. Everything is solemn and grotesque at the same time. Brrr... I was scared of my own thoughts.
I really want to share my experiences, but with whom? It is stupid to even think about talking about such things with cellmates. Besides, even if I do tell, it will still be for selfish reasons: to share what is happening to me, to listen to dissuasions and words of support. If it were not for this diary, with which I can share at least part of my experiences, I can’t imagine what would have happened to me...

Chapter 41
Spam is, first and foremost, a business
- Pavlovich, with the papers, - an expressionless voice behind the door ordered me to the offices.
- And I was already hoping to see the investigator, - I drawled a little disappointedly, seeing that only my lawyer was waiting for me.
- You'll have a different investigator now - Belsky quit, - she tried to make it clear that she wasn't eating her bread for nothing. - Well, how are you doing?
- What kind of business could I have?! Did you see what the Prosecutor General's Office responded? - That is, we broke the law, of course, but we needed it...
— Well, excuse me, we are not in Europe, — Marina Mikhailovna spread her hands. — There, every fourth verdict is an acquittal, and here, only 0.3% are like that.
— I would say — unfortunately, we are not in Europe. The law is the law so that everyone without exception follows it. But here it turns out that only ordinary citizens must follow the law, and it doesn’t apply to the police, the KGB, prosecutors, or judges. That’s why evidence obtained in violation of the law and having no legal force is used as evidence…
— Okay, that’s all just poetry. But in reality, you are accused of advertising pornographic materials through spam mailings. Tell me in detail what is what, and together we will think about how to fight off these accusations. What is spam?
— From the recipient’s point of view, spam is garbage in an e-mail box. But from the spammers’ point of view, it is, first and foremost, a business. And it, like any other business, has its own business schemes. There are two main schemes in the spam business: affiliate programs and classic interaction at the level of "customer - contractor". An affiliate program, or "affiliate program", is a marketing technique when a distributor of a product pays spammers not for advertising as such, but for each client brought in. This is the scheme used by sellers of the most common spam products: Viagra, replicas of luxury goods and cheap software. In addition, affiliate programs are often used to distribute porn and advertise online casinos. The second scheme works according to the simplest and most understandable "customer - contractor" scenario. A small company (without money for advertising in traditional media) hires a spammer to organize advertising of its product. This scheme is especially popular in RuNet.
- What scheme did you use?
- Exclusively through "affiliate programs": how many clients you brought in - all yours.
- And what did you advertise?
- "Adult" (adult porn) and Viagra. About 68% of websites visited on the Internet are pornographic...
- And do "affiliate programs" have a normal attitude towards spam?
- Not all of them. Officially, spam is prohibited. But in reality, many "affiliate programs" turn a blind eye to it. Of course, you cannot use scenes of violence and hard pornography, words like "lolita", "minors", etc. in advertising. It would also be useful to point out that our site contains "adult" materials and that if you are under eighteen, then we ask you to get out of here and go to Disney.com. In general, any ban can be circumvented.
- Didn't you have a feeling that you were doing something dirty and immoral? - the lawyer suddenly turned in another direction.
- What do you mean! I didn't sell anyone to a Turkish brothel, didn't take away their documents, and didn't even force them to act in porn. For me, this is just business, colored pixels on a monitor screen. You bring in a client - you get a commission.
- And you weren't involved in child pornography?
— Never. Despite the crazy profitability of 5000%. Although many Russian adult webmasters started their business by selling child porn, and some still have archives with “lolitas” buried in their gardens.
— How much did you get for each client you brought in?
— “Affiliate programs” pay either a fixed price for each registration (sign-up), usually $30–40, or a percentage of all sales (partnership). In the long term, “partnership” usually turned out to be more profitable, since you get money for the entire time that the client pays for access to the porn site. Some users, without noticing it, paid for a subscription for six months. How? When the user clicks the “pay” button, the payment form by default has a check mark next to “withdraw $30 from my credit card and automatically renew access for the next month”. This is called a rebill. About 80% of people agree to the terms of service on the Internet without reading them, although, for example, in the USA in 2002 a court decision recognized the legal force of such agreements.
- How much did you earn on spam?
- Spammers all over the world earn $10-15 billion a year, - I avoided a direct answer, - experts find it difficult to give a more precise estimate of this business. Due to its anonymity, spam is an ideal way to sell counterfeit, unlicensed or counterfeit goods, as well as illegal goods and services. Ordinary people are mistaken in thinking that normal people do not buy goods advertised in mass mailings - about 30% of Internet users not only buy goods advertised in spam, but also do so regularly.
- Apparently, we will have to clear our e-mail boxes of advertising "garbage" for a long time to come ... - my lawyer stated sadly.
- In any case, the life of spam is limited. In a few years, Internet technologies will change and mass mailings from one source will become impossible. What will spammers do then? For example, they will take on client sites for promotion, guaranteeing them the first places in search results for keywords. To do this, they will have to enter into a confrontation with search engines - play with keywords, mislead search robots. This is called SEO (search engine optimisation) - search engine optimisation of the site. The activity is also not entirely socially useful, but at least it does not rape citizens' mailboxes.
- How did you even come to all this?
- The last time I was in prison ...
- I see that many of my clients came up with criminal schemes while sitting in prison, - Vorobyova interrupted me.
- Not surprising. Prison is a lack of space, compensated for by an excess of time ...
- Have you already looked in the Criminal Code, what punishment is provided for the article on the distribution of pornography?
— Yes, Article 343 — up to two years of correctional labor. Does not provide for imprisonment. The main thing for us is to fight off the credit cards, the rest is unimportant.
— Well, the investigator will come, let's at least see what you are accused of...
— When will he come? I haven't seen him for three months, he only sends me "extended days" — he extended the investigation period for another two months.
— Nothing can be done — all we can do is wait...

Chapter 42
Every Family Has a Black Sheep
The investigator finally came — a slightly plump man in his early thirties, in an expensive but tasteless striped suit.
— My name is Alexander Evgenievich. My last name is Sushko, — he introduced himself.
— I've been waiting for you for a long time. — I didn't need to introduce myself: the entire "K" department not only knew me, but also quietly hated me.
— I understand. Do you want to know how they found you?
— I know: they came to an agreement with the committee members, searched my house, got access to my computer — and now you have a criminal case.
— Well, why did you tell them your passwords? — Sushko spread his hands. — If you hadn’t named them, there would have been no case — it’s impossible to decipher passwords of such length today.
— The Chekists are corrupt bastards. They knew that I was helping them investigate the case of the “werewolves” from your department, and they still threw me in the “furnace”…
— Well, they already got the dirt from you, and now they’ve even jailed you as a criminal. They killed two birds with one stone. Do you understand now what kind of department this is?
— Knights with warm hearts and clean hands… Yeah… A bunch of traitors… And the Prosecutor General’s Office… I won’t even mention them — they use the law exclusively in the way that suits them now.
— It turns out that...
— ...that the Ministry of Internal Affairs turned out to be the most "white and fluffy" of them all... At least you don't hide your cop nature, and the KGB are the same freaks, but they hide behind high matters.
— Exactly. But initially I didn't mean this and not you — I was talking about how we got on the trail of your group.
— What group, if I'm the only one sitting here?!
— The Americans think differently. Did you read their press release? — The difficulty Sushko had in pronouncing words like "press release" betrayed his proletarian origins, which he carefully concealed.
— Yes, I saw it — Marina Mikhailovna brought it, — the lawyer and I exchanged glances.
— Now look at another document, — the investigator reached into his briefcase and handed me the Indictment Memorandum in the case of "United States v. Albert Gonzalez".
— According to our information, you were also a member of this organization, — he added. - And look at this, - Sushko took out some document with the stamp of an American court from a huge folder.
- It's as old as the world: they found a weak link, gave him false hope, and he gave everyone up. The Americans' methods of work, as far as I can see, are not much different from yours.
— Human psychology hasn’t changed much over the millennia… Did you know that the US Secret Service paid Gonzalez $75,000 a year?
— What for?! — Sushko’s words interested me.
— Have you heard of Operation Firewall?
— Apart from the fact that several dozen of the most famous American carders were arrested during it, I don’t know anything about it, — I strained my memory.
— In May 2004, Cumbajohnny, one of the administrators of the ShadowCrew forum, made an offer that attracted the attention of many forum members — it was proposed to use the services of a private VPN service, only for ShadowCrew members. Do you know what that is?
— Virtual private network — a virtual private network, usually used to provide access to a corporate network from employees’ homes. But carders are attracted to VPN for another reason: every byte of traffic from their computer will be encrypted, which guarantees protection from sniffing - all attempts by intelligence agencies to track user activity will not advance beyond the data center where the VPN server is installed.
— Yes, that’s right. But a VPN server has one drawback that many people know: everything transmitted over the network can be tracked from the central node, which is often unencrypted and vulnerable to eavesdropping. “If the FBI or another government agency wants, they can come to the data center, change the VPN server configuration settings, and record all the logs of our actions,” one of the ShadowCrew members wrote on the forum. “No one will touch the VPN without my knowledge,” Cumbajohnny reassured the forum members. What ShadowCrew users didn’t know was that nine months earlier, New York police detained Albert “Cumbajohnny” Gonzalez near an ATM while trying to withdraw money from someone else’s card. Secret Service agents interrogated him and very soon exposed the truth: the 21-year-old son of Cuban immigrants rented an apartment for $700, had $12,000 in credit card debt, and was officially unemployed. In the end, the Secret Service persuaded Albert to become an informant. The VPN service was a very successful invention of the agency. The equipment was purchased with federal money, and they received warrants to record the actions of all users. Thus, the VPN service "for carders only" became an invitation to a trap. The most serious figures of ShadowCrew fell into the network spread by the Secret Service. And they were paid from $30 to $50 per month for this. Gonzalez received $75 thousand per year from the US government for his work. From April 2003 to October 2004, Secret Service agents closely monitored the activity on ShadowCrew, collecting materials for arrests. However, one operation almost failed - the hacker Ethics hacked the network of the T-Mobile mobile operator, stole official documents from the PDA of one of the Secret Service agents and posted evidence on the site that the forum was being monitored. But Gonzalez, who by that time had become the head of ShadowCrew, managed to reduce all suspicions to zero. On October 26, 2004, twenty-six of the most active members of the carding community were arrested around the world, ShadowCrew itself ceased to exist, and the informant returned to his native Miami. How do you like that, huh?
- Every family has a black sheep... And how did it turn out that Maksik was connected with Gonzalez? As far as I know, he worked with Johnnyhell...
- The Secret Service analyzed Yastremskiy's account in the E-gold payment system and saw that between February and May 2006, Maksik transferred $410,750 to the Segvec account. The feds pulled this thread and soon found out that the supplier of dumps for Maksik was Albert Gonzalez, aka Segvec. In addition, when he first registered his ICQ, Albert indicated the email address soupnazi@eefnet.ru . The nickname soupnazi was familiar to the feds since the first arrest of Albert Gonzalez.
- Here is the protocol of the inspection of your computer, - Sushko again reached into his black, seemingly bottomless, leather briefcase and pulled out thirty-two typewritten sheets, fastened together.
I quickly glanced at the document: “To detect and record traces of the crime during the inspection, an official computer was used, on which the following were installed: the Linux operating system, a standard set of Linux programs, as well as the Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 operating system, the standard Microsoft Office XP program package, the WriteBlocker program, which blocks any changes to the information on the connected HDD (hard magnetic disk drives); as well as the EnCase hardware and software complex. The hard drive is connected to the official computer. Using the WriteBlocker XP version 6.10 program, the ability to write information to machine storage media connected to the official computer is blocked. Then, an inspection of the contents of the media was carried out using the I Look Investigator v 8.0.14 analytical software package.
- EnCase, FastBlock, WriteBlocker, I Look Investigator ... During the investigation of my past crimes, none of this came up ... - I said thoughtfully.
— I remembered last year’s snow: that was in 2004, and now, thank God, — Sushko looked at his watch, — 2008. You are starting to use computers more and more — we need increasingly sophisticated tools to catch you. Many people don’t even suspect that almost all actions on a computer, be it surfing the web or communicating via ICQ, leave traces…
— Well, that’s nothing new to me. Okay, what is this EnCase hardware and software complex?
— The standard of computer forensics. An American development. A computer with EnCase software installed, which is very successful in recovering deleted data.
— And what is the FastBlock device?
— The process of computer forensics is usually divided into three phases: searching for evidence, analyzing it, and reporting. The stage of searching for evidence involves transferring data from a storage medium (floppy disk, flash drive, hard drive) to the expert’s computer. At the same time, it is necessary to guarantee that the original storage medium will not be recorded. Because Windows, for example, records data on any device when it is connected.
FastBlock is a hardware tool that blocks changes to information on HDDs (hard magnetic disk drives) and allows you to safely transfer the contents of the suspect's hard drive to the expert's computer. Then EnCase gets down to business.
- ?..
- The "program" works with almost any type of media. For example, you can recover photos from flash cards for digital cameras. EnCase also recovers deleted emails.
- All this can be done with free utilities, such as Knoppix-STD and Penguin Sleuth Kit...
- That's true, but when EnCase is used, millions or even billions of dollars are often at stake. Therefore, its price of several thousand dollars is justified. In addition to EnCase, the Americans also use Forensic Toolkit (FTK).
— Is there a way to bypass EnCase?
— Short of physically destroying all hard drives, CDs, flash drives and floppy disks, there are very few ways. Note that I mean physical destruction, because simply smashing the hard drive with a hammer or throwing it into a fire may not be enough. In many cases, you will have to turn the drive into ashes.
Sometimes attackers — and you in particular — try to complicate the examination by changing file extensions. If you rename a file, say, passport.jpg to test.txt, Windows will open meaningless text in Notepad. EnCase allows you to determine whether a file belongs to a specific program. EnCase will also detect hiding information inside pictures or music.
— ?..
— There are thousands of ways to include a message, sound or image in another file. This is called steganography. Many hackers are sure that if you hide secret information in. avi or. wav files, even God himself will not find it. However, few people know that the steganography algorithms used in most cases are long outdated and the probability of detecting your personal, deeply hidden data is close to 100%.
- There are tools that allow you to completely delete files from your hard drive - I used Eraser. Standard deletion in Windows erases only the information used to access files - the data in the files themselves remain unchanged. Eraser or BestCrypt Wipe erase the information used to access files and write zeros over all data. The US Department of Defense magnetic media destruction standard provides for seven-pass erasure - zeros are written over data seven times ...
- However, in order for EnCase not to be able to recover files deleted in this way, the data would have to be written over thirty-five times ... - we recovered all your deleted files. It was necessary to defragment the hard drive more often, which previously contained confidential information, since the defragmentation process allows you to more reliably delete the remains of information that could have been erased insufficiently effectively. And it wouldn't hurt to format the crypts, at least from time to time.
Your mistake was also that you named many files like price for us, our price - indirect evidence that the crime was committed in complicity...
- I can't understand why the hell the message history in &RQ was saved, I definitely didn't save it...
- And sometimes technology behaves unpredictably... and there are no perfect crimes...
- And what is I Look Investigator?
- A program for a comprehensive analysis of computer hard drive images. Okay, Sergey, now you tell me something.
- ?..
— When my operatives entered your apartment, the encrypted disks (TrueCrypt containers) on your laptop were open. The operatives copied their contents to drive C, but when they brought the laptop to the department, there was nothing on drive C. Why?
— It's simple. Tell me: why do you take the hard drives out of our computers and connect them to your machines for examination? Wouldn't it be easier to conduct the examination directly on our computers?
— Well... you can install a "logical bomb" in your computer, which will go off when you perform (or, conversely, when you do not perform) certain actions and destroy all critical information.
— I see that you know the theory, but your operatives are not very good at practice. My laptop had the Deep Freeze program installed, which completely "freezes" any disk of your choice. I installed Windows and all the necessary software - all sorts of antiviruses and firewalls, configured the system for myself - and "froze" the system disk. Not a single virus, Trojan or hacker will be able to gain a foothold in your computer. And if they can, then only until the first reboot.
- Did you turn on your laptop after my employees had messed around there?!
- Yeah. Under the pretext that in order to properly disconnect the flash drive, it would be necessary to disconnect it from under Windows using the "safely remove device" function. Opera did not object. And the C drive, to which they copied the contents of my cryptocontainers, turned out to be the system drive...
- What bastards! - Sushko spat angrily.

Chapter 43
Information Hunger
My pain has become my fault,
My life is thinning like hair...
My angel,
just
talk to me -
I haven't heard your voice for so long.
I won’t see you, I won’t reach out to you,
You’ll never look at me with a smile.
My angel, deceive me, calm me down —
With your echo, your shaky shadow.
Even if you know, when behind your back
The bolt will clank and the door will creak with effort…
My angel,
just
talk to me —
Even if you know that this is completely
unnecessary…
E. Polyanskaya
No news. The lawyer hasn’t come. And I received the last letter from Katya thirty-seven days ago… I can’t imagine what such breaks in our correspondence are connected with. It would be better if she hadn’t written at all — I wouldn’t live in constant anticipation of these damn letters and wouldn’t guess: either she’s not writing, or the letter “hasn’t arrived” again… It turns out that information hunger can be no less painful than other varieties of this feeling. And that it is more humiliating, that’s for sure. You want to know what's going on in the outside world, but you can't know because some colonel decided with his stupid brain that you shouldn't know and "froze" your correspondence...
Only now have I begun to understand why I was sent to the Zhodino pretrial detention center instead of the Minsk one. And it is not only because of the overcrowding in Volodarka. Zhodino prison is often chosen for the category of defendants who need to be pressured or psychologically broken. The distance from Minsk (50 kilometers) does not allow prisoners to see their lawyers often or learn news from home.
A few days ago, I began to believe in God. Perhaps not in the God whose visual image is imposed on us by all branches of the Christian church, but in a higher being, the basis of the universe, balance and universal order. At the same time, I also believe in fate - that our future is predetermined, but exists in several versions, at every step there is a crossroad, and you are always free to choose whether to turn right or left. And then there will be a new fork and a new choice. Everyone determines their own path and direction - some to the sunrise, to the source of light, and some to the sunset - into the darkness ...

Chapter 44
Prison No. 8
I am writing again and again I do not know if you will read this. Maybe I just want you to see this and know how much I love you ... I forgive ... I forgive you everything in advance. I love you so much that I do not have the strength to live without you. I look at your photograph, and it seems that you are looking at me in response ... I squeeze the teddy bear that you gave me in my hands and cry ... Darling, I can not do this anymore, I can not ... I am going crazy here alone, why did you leave me here? ..
From Katya's letter
"Bring me more pens," I asked Vorobyova at the beginning of January.
"I brought you two last time. Or have you already written them all out?" the lawyer opened her purse and took out a few more "balloons" for me.
"They took them from me.
" "How did they take them?!
— They search us after we leave the offices, so that we don’t bring anything prohibited…
— What a “prohibition” — a ballpoint pen…
— The controller, an eighteen-year-old brat, asked: “Where did you get the pens from?”
— And what about you?
— I took them from the lawyer, I have nothing to write with. “Not allowed, throw them away.” I had to throw them away. True, I broke them before that, so that the bastard wouldn’t get them…
— Lying is a sin before God, but a very useful thing in the face of circumstances… You could have said that you took them with you from home…
— You can.
— You know, Sergey, what do you lack?
— ?..
— You lack the ability to lie. When everyone around you lies, the truth brings only trouble…
Prison No. 8 in Zhodino, near Minsk, was once the toughest prison in Belarus. Today, it has lost this dubious title to the Vitebsk pretrial detention center. The reason? Prison warden Kuzavkov, whom all the prisoners call Kuzavok, was transferred to serve in the Vitebsk prison, but his ghost still hovers in the underground galleries of the Zhodino central. Prison workers still elevate the former warden to the rank of a deity and consider it an honor to shake his hand. They
start exerting psychological pressure on you as soon as you jump off the paddy wagon. When the cops enter the "sedimentation tank," everyone must turn away from the door and give their names in this position. When the cops enter the cell, everyone is obliged to greet them in unison: "Hello, citizen chief," the duty officer states his full name, year of birth, article, and then it begins: "Uh-uh-uh, why aren't your mugs polished?" (they give out sand to clean aluminum mugs here). - "No, they're all shiny - you can use it instead of a mirror." - "Uh-uh, well then why isn't your toilet faucet shiny?" As is well known, the cops can even get stuck to a pole.
Human rights are constantly violated here, and the internal regulations exist only for prisoners. The employees of Prison No. 8 fear the norms of the Criminal Executive Code more than the devil fears incense. Books cannot be handed in here, which violates our right to self-education. And although a library comes once every two or three weeks, this long-written-off communist-patriotic waste paper cannot be called literature. Here, it is forbidden to wear shorts and sleeveless T-shirts, even when the temperature in the cell rises above forty. They make you shave regularly, although they only give you one disposable razor for every five people, and there are people infected with HIV in the same cell with you. Bed linen is washed once a week, and for some reason only one of two sheets. Plastic dishes are constantly thrown out of the cells, although they are usually allowed in without any problems when entering the prison.
The food is bad - the portions are very small, and the main diet is fish soup made from sprats, pate made from the same fish, and sauerkraut in all its forms. More or less decent "rations" are given on Tuesdays, when the prison administration makes its rounds of its territory: oatmeal with milk in the morning, pea soup and pasta at lunch. For four months they did not give (or even sell) regular salt. Food has to be cut with thread or homemade cutters made from disposable razors. If they find it, you'll get five days in the punishment cell or a reprimand for the first time.
They sell toothpaste in tin tubes at the prison kiosk and offer to squeeze it into a plastic bag, since prisoners are forbidden to have things in metal packaging. Your shaving foam will also be squeezed into a bag when you arrive at the prison.
Despite the fact that the cells are often overcrowded, at 10:00 pm (lights out) the water and electricity are turned off. When you are “raised” to your cell, you will not be given a mattress and blanket until the next morning, and on your first night you have to sleep on the floor or on the table (this is normal here). You are not allowed to sleep during the day. I once asked a controller:
“Why don’t you let us sleep during the day? It is well known that the more you sleep, the fewer violations.
” “But we have a different policy: a prisoner must be exhausted during the day so that he does not think about escaping at night,” he answered.
There is a bathhouse (a regular shower) on each floor of the prison, but you will have to walk there in your underwear, often under the gaze of female controllers. Walks are mandatory, you cannot refuse. They can keep you in the pouring rain for two hours.
Letters from the Zhodino prison take twelve days to reach their addressee, and if you do not have an envelope, you will not be able to send a single complaint. It is impossible to complain about the actions of the administration - not a single "scribble" of yours will leave the walls of the institution, although according to the law this should happen within 24 hours.
Only convicted persons can communicate with the priest, and those under investigation - not at all.
Lawyers sometimes wait for two hours, and it happens that they bring you to the lawyer, and in half an hour it is lunch, and the inspectors do not care at all that you are not hungry at all: if you do not want to eat, then go to the cell or sit for an hour in the "sedimentation tank".
They are simply afraid of the administration's rounds here, and for good reason - because this is first of all a reason to pay increased attention to the cell, take away all the extra dishes, mugs, etc. It is useless to ask any questions - there is a ready-made answer for everything in the form of "oral order from the prison warden". Any louse, even the smallest, in the Zhodino prison loves and demands to be called "citizen chief". For a normal person, even saying such a thing is humiliating.
For the slightest offense or disagreement with the regime, the cops take away all board games from the cell and constantly blackmail you by disconnecting the electrical outlet. This is probably why there are practically no TVs here - so as not to give the cops an extra lever of pressure on you.
There are rumors around the center that there are still "press huts" here, where they beat you from the start, force you to write confessions and give evidence. The cops willingly stir up such talk in order to instill a sense of fear in new arrivals.
Of course, the prisoners themselves are also to blame for the fact that the cops managed to impose exactly this regime. It must be understood that, unlike the capital's Volodarka, the Zhodino prison has always been a district-level detention center, and people from the surrounding villages, towns, and district centers sat there. Dark, downtrodden people, many of whom had seen nothing in life except beatings and the nearest liquor store, and when the prison inspector offers a choice: "paper" (a report on violation of the detention regime) or two blows with a mallet (a wooden hammer for tapping on bunks), they choose the latter.
Once I ended up in a Polish pre-trial detention center. It was here that I saw some strange humanity emanating from the staff - the employees of the Polish prison seemed to me to be decent, responsible, and conscientious people, and, as it seemed, they were responsible not only for the implementation of the regime, but also for the work of their hands. This was new knowledge about prison.
Of course, Polish detention centers have everything we have: electric locks, bars, steel doors with a peephole, but there are no "feeding troughs" - the staff there does not communicate with prisoners through a hole in the door. And one evening, the duty officer - essentially a civilian (in Poland, prison staff does not belong to the police department) opened the doors in all the huts and said:
- Talk about whatever you want, just don't visit each other ...
In those ten minutes, my accomplices and I talked about everything (in hints, of course), which saved ourselves from long prison terms.
The staff of Prison-8 do not just do their job - they hate us and try to re-educate us in their own way: they shout, beat us (although until our guilt is proven in court, we are not guilty of anything) and thereby create constant psychological discomfort and pressure. Of course, over time you get used to even worse things, but your body is still in a state of permanent stress, and you eagerly await the transfer to another “correctional” institution…
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg equates the conditions of detention in pre-trial detention centers and prisons of the former USSR to torture. This is probably why in Russia, since 2007, one day spent in a pre-trial detention center has been equivalent to two days in a penal colony. In Belarus, this will probably never happen…

Chapter 45
Tales from the Vienna Woods
- So, the odds are about three to about ten. So, on one side, three, on the other, ten. Three, ten… Yes, I’ll have to rat on my friends. It’s not fair. And what would you advise me, Boris Vasilyevich? - The truth. Only the truth. - The truth… I think so too, three times ten, which means only the truth.
From the film “Don’t Wake a Sleeping Dog”
— Of course, I am not God and not the judge who will hear your case, — investigator Sushko began in early February, — but I can make sure that you get the minimum sentence — six years. To do this, you need to give up your accomplices, as well as your patrons from the KGB.
— Thank you, but no need. Leave these tales of the Vienna Woods for others — even at school they don’t believe in them anymore.
— Don’t rush to refuse, Sergei. Think carefully.
— I will give all the testimony in court — you won’t hear anything from me.
— Well, as you wish, — it was impossible to tell from the investigator’s face whether he was disappointed by my refusal or did not care. — Here are copies of some documents, sign that you have read them.
I looked at the first document. It was a complete log of my Internet connections in the form: date, start and end time of the Internet session, IP address provided by my Internet provider.
It turns out that the "K" department, using a traffic sniffer installed on the Beltelecom Internet provider, monitored my online activity the entire time I lived in this apartment. The log was then analyzed using the NetResident program.
- And how could you protect yourself from this? - I already knew the answer to this question myself, but I wanted to hear it from Sushko.
- Go online using a 3G modem, registered, of course, to another person, or via Wi-Fi - there are plenty of poorly protected Wi-Fi networks in your area. And, of course, do not tell anyone which Internet provider you use - my counterpart, despite his collective farm accent, was up to the task.
The second document was a statement of transactions on the SMP Bank card.
I was surprised how much can be learned from just one credit card statement: the subject uses his card regularly, his favorite bar is Pristan (an average of three visits per week), restaurant is Miami Blues, perfume shop is Brokar, grocery store is Furshet. The subject probably smokes — purchase at Fortuna cigar house), drives a car with a powerful engine (on December 5, he filled up with gas at OKKO gas station for $51 — at $0.80 gasoline price, that’s about 70 liters of fuel) and lives with a steady girlfriend (purchase for $366 at Bell Femme lingerie store).
All purchases except the last two were made in Ukraine. On March 21, 2008, he made a purchase at Duty Free at Boryspil airport, the next transaction was already in Egypt. We enter jollie ville into Google and find out that the subject stayed at the Jollie Ville hotel in Sharm el-Sheikh. That's it, finita la comedy!
— Add to this hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras in every modern metropolis, — the interest with which I examined the document did not escape Sushko’s attention, — in Great Britain alone there are more than 4.5 million of them, facial scanners that compare the faces of random passers-by with a database of wanted criminals, tracking by cell phone billing, an American system that allows you to track any purchase of a US citizen (various databases are compared, which can be used to track large monetary transactions, such as withdrawing a significant amount from a bank account, buying one-way plane or train tickets, renting cars, buying weapons, chemicals and medicines) — every minute of your day can be scheduled.
— Why don’t you want to release me on bail? — I moved on to a topic that was more exciting to me.
— Why don’t you want to? — a false surprise appeared on the investigator’s face. — We discussed this issue in our department... A million... dollars, of course, — and you’re free.
— Are you completely nuts?! What million?
— Well, so what? On your computer they found wholesale prices for the Weapon, end-user certificates (the purchaser of the Weapon guarantees that it will not go beyond his country), copies of concluded contracts and letters of intent, photos with African ministers, gold, diamonds... And you still say that a million is a lot?! — Sushko summed up.
"It's good that he is not the Lord God," I thought.

Chapter 46
Hunger Strike
Baby... it's simply unbearable... I am again overcome by some kind of terrible depression... I am unhappy with everything around me, nothing makes me happy... I just dream very often... do you know what? Everything is banal and simple... about you hugging me... Lord, how I envy those who can be with their loved ones... Can just call, hear a voice, come at any moment... How I want it...
From Katya's letter
In March, I was denied bail for the third time. Not long before that, the investigator had once again extended my detention, although he had sworn to close the case and start familiarizing me with the materials. I immediately appealed the "extended detention" in court, filed a complaint with the Prosecutor General's Office and went on a hunger strike.
A hunger strike — a voluntary refusal to eat — looks something like this within the walls of Zhodino Central: first, you are placed in the “assembly” — a small “sedimentation area” (1.5 x 2.5 m), the average temperature in which does not exceed +10 °C — you have to sleep in three pants, two sweaters, a down jacket, a hat and gloves, and you still freeze. The bunk is folded back only at night, and they do not provide a mattress at all. You are not allowed to take almost anything from your personal belongings — I had to fight to get soap, a toothbrush and a towel. The window does not open, they do not take you for walks, and they do not allow smoking. You cannot write (pens and paper are taken away), read — either, letters and newspapers are not brought. They do not provide boiling water. Some are not even allowed to take warm clothes with them. It is impossible to get through to anyone from the prison authorities, even the DPNT (the duty assistant to the prison warden).
I don’t know how long the prison administration is required to inform the prosecutor and investigator, but here they don’t do it at all — the prison administration deliberately creates all the conditions for you to break down and quickly give up your demands.
You want to eat most of all on the sixteenth to eighteenth hour after refusing food. Then you just forget about the feeling of hunger.
On the fourth day, my lawyer came:
“Come on, stop your hunger strike,” she said. — The prosecutor’s office replied that this “extended day” was the last one, you will soon begin to familiarize yourself with the case.
— Well, thank God — at least some certainty…
— Why did you even start all this? The hunger strike as a form of protest in Belarus has completely exhausted itself, they simply don’t pay attention to it…
— I wrote about it in the complaint — so I had to announce it.
— Okay, we got our way. Now we’re waiting for the investigator with the case…
That same day, they returned me to my previous cell. I had a bad cold in my lower back — I had to take diclofenac and warm up.

Chapter 47
We often give into the hands of the enemy...
- Have you heard that Miklashevich, another colonel from the "K" department, was arrested? - Vorobyova asked me the day after the end of my hunger strike.
- God is not a sucker - He sees everything.
- ?..
- The whole department decided on the amount of money for which to release me. They named a million, - I explained. - Comedians, damn it... Now there is a second one from the "K" department in jail...
- Well, that doesn't make things any easier for us. Sushko will be here soon, he left later than me. He will acquaint you with the results of the art expert examination. By the way, he is now deputy head of the department - Makarevich had to resign, the clouds were gathering heavily over him. So Sushko took his seat.
The first of the documents that the investigator showed me that day was the indictment signed by a special agent of the US Secret Service.
— Sonelao… one of my best clients, aka surfrider, aka Mr. Towellie, aka Richard Druc, owner of Surfrider Boards, aka… United States Secret Service Special Agent Ryan Knisley… All secrets eventually come to light…
— Exactly. Do you understand now why he didn’t fly to the Dominican Republic with you? — Sushko diluted my monologue.
— It’s as clear as day: he was waiting for the court to issue a warrant for my arrest, so that later, right at the airport, he could say: “You are under arrest. You may remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you
in court.” I can imagine what kind of “full board” would have awaited my brother and me in Thailand, if our trip there in 2004 hadn’t fallen through…
— Do you remember the story with the Russian hackers Ivanov and Gorshkov, who were invited to work in the USA and arrested there?
— I remember. It was in 2000, I think. One was twenty years old, the other was nineteen. Somewhere in the Urals, guys, — the investigator made me remember the events of ten years ago.
— Yes, from Chelyabinsk. They were extorting money from American companies. First, they scanned the victim's network for vulnerabilities. When they found any, the hackers contacted the company's system administrator. Most often, this happened via e-mail. The text of the letter was always approximately the same: "Hello! I represent a group of computer experts. We specialize in checking the security of server software, credit systems, etc. At present, our group is located outside the United States, and the laws of our country are loyal to this kind of activity." Then there was a list of vulnerabilities found by the hackers. The administrator was asked to demand money from the management so that the "group of computer experts" would not next time destroy the entire contents of the server. From small firms they demanded a couple of hundred bucks, from serious companies - several tens of thousands.
Most often, online casinos (as a repository of credit card information), bank servers, and Internet service providers were attacked. The list of companies that suffered included the financial broker Online Information Bureau (it missed tens of thousands of credit cards), the Internet provider Speakeasy.net, Korean Bank in Los Angeles, and even Western Union, which missed information on 16,000 of its customers’ credit cards. When the music store CD Universe refused to pay the hackers a ransom of $100,000, thousands of its customers’ credit cards immediately appeared on public Internet sites. Ivanov and Gorshkov were so confident in their impunity that they often left text files with content like “Alex was here” on hacked servers. Moreover, the hackers offered themselves as security consultants. Ivanov sent his resume, accompanied by a photograph.
It is not known how long the nightmare of American system administrators would have lasted if Ivanov had not chosen E-Money Inc., a major player in the interactive payments market, as his next victim. A traditional letter was sent with approximately the following content: “You are not protected. So that your heart does not go bad, give us some money.” This time the hackers asked for a lot - $500 thousand.
The Americans sent materials about Ivanov’s illegal activities to the Russian FSB, but they were simply ignored. It became clear that it would be impossible to arrest the hacker in Russia. It was necessary to lure him to the USA. Then FBI agents created a website for a non-existent computer company Invita Technologies and made Alexey Ivanov an offer to work in the USA as a security expert for this company. Before employment, it was necessary to pass an interview in Seattle. The FBI was happy to pay for the trip. Ivanov not only took the bait of the agents, but also dragged Vasily Gorshkov along to America as a business partner.
"I heard about recent intrusions into the networks of American companies, some of which paid the hackers money to stop the attacks," began the FBI agent who played the director of Invita. "I know that you are quite capable of this. Maybe it was you?"
"A few months ago we did something similar," answered Alexey Ivanov, "but we decided that it was not a very profitable business." Nevertheless, he sat down at the computer and, at the request of the Americans, immediately hacked several sites to demonstrate his professional skills.
"And what about credit cards?" the "director" did not calm down.
"Since we are on US territory, we will never admit that we got them," answered Vasily Gorshkov.
At that time, a computer expert from the University of Washington invited by the FBI, who played the role of another Invita employee, got into the computer from which Ivanov was defacing websites, and found in the memory of a pre-activated keylogger (a program for remembering keystrokes) a password that the hacker used for remote access to his home computer in Chelyabinsk (from there he took the programs he needed to hack websites).
Vasily Gorshkov was sentenced to three years in prison and a $690,000 fine, his partner Alexey Ivanov received four years.
- It turns out that Sonelao's plans to lure me first to Thailand and then to the Dominican Republic were thwarted twice...
- It turns out that way. But the Secret Service agents managed to lure Maksik to Turkey, - Vorobyova joined our conversation. — And although all the important information on his laptop was encrypted using the PGP program, after several days spent in a Turkish prison, Maksik “for some reason” told investigators his password, consisting of seven characters.
— Two punches to the kidneys will open any password, — I tried to joke. — But in general, modern encryption programs are so complex that even the NSA (US National Security Agency) cannot crack them. In the 1990s, the US Department of Justice and the FBI tried to outlaw encryption in the United States, citing the fact that it would be used by terrorists, organized crime, pedophiles and hackers. American mathematicians were warned about the undesirability of developing super-complex encryption algorithms, but it was too late: the genie was out of the bottle. In 1991, American programmer and public figure Phil Zimmerman developed and made available a free program that he called PGP (pretty good privacy).
This did not stop government agencies and intelligence agencies in their attempts to prohibit the development of data encryption software. In 1993, the Clinton administration tried to force the installation of a special clipper chip in all computers and phones, which was essentially a master key that allowed the government to crack any encryption, but the chips turned out to be imperfect and the project was shut down in 1996.
Then legislators took a different approach - they recalled the techniques of the Cold War era and equated the development of complex encryption algorithms with the export of weapons. Now American developers could not embed encryption modules in the software they created. In addition, the federal government imposed a ban on the distribution of encryption programs in America that did not have built-in backdoors - keys that allow government agents to crack the encryption at any time. All these measures led to the fact that foreign firms, not bound by such bans, significantly squeezed the United States in the encryption software market, and in 2005 all restrictions were lifted.
— Max Butler, aka Iceman, the owner of the CardersMarket forum, encrypted all information that was undesirable for prying eyes using the DriveCrypt program developed for the Israeli military, which has a key length of 1344 bits, much higher than even the standards of the Ministry of Defense. Max expected that when the police asked for the passwords to his encrypted drives, he would refuse and even if he sat for six months or a year under various pretexts, but after that he would be released — without his files, the feds would not be able to investigate his crimes. He was wrong, — Sushko summed up eloquently.
— ?..
— The key to cracking full disk encryption programs like DriveCrypt, BestCrypt, etc. can be obtained while the program is running on the computer. Even if you have already disconnected your encrypted drives, the password to them, once entered, is still stored in the computer's random access memory (RAM). When Secret Service agents broke into Max's house, they immediately forced him to the floor at gunpoint and did not allow him to reboot his server and laptop. If he had succeeded, all the contents of the RAM would have disappeared. Experts from the CERT team sat down at their computers and began their work: using a program to capture the contents of RAM, they copied all the "live" data from RAM to an external drive. It took CERT researchers only two weeks to find Max's password in a "snapshot" of his computer's memory, after which Attorney Luke Demboski handed Butler's attorney a piece of paper with the password written on it: "!!One man can make a difference!" ("And one person can change something!")
- You'd better tell me this: an international warrant for my arrest was issued on April 28. After that, I managed to visit Ukraine, Dubai, and the Maldives. How is that possible?
- This happens often: even through Interpol channels, information does not spread very quickly. When we put a person on the wanted list, the first thing we do is "check" whether a weapon is registered in his name, then - whether he is registered with a mental health or drug treatment center, his place of registration and actual address of residence, family composition, what vehicles he owns, passport series and number, information about crossing state borders (with which country, when, what type of transport), whether he bought plane or train tickets - we have such a database, too - and only after that we put the object on "guard control" - border guards are obliged to detain him upon his first entry / exit from the country.
- Of course, I'm good too: mail on Yahoo! and in US-friendly Israel, bin lists and dumps sent by e-mail!.. Damn Yahoo! keeps all emails, even deleted ones, with attached files, for three years (or more). What kind of servers do you have to have!..
— Iceman used mail on Hushmail — a Canadian mail server that promised its customers to provide reliable encryption of their correspondence. With the help of a special Java applet, users' letters were encrypted right on their home computers, before they reached the company's server. Hushmail claimed that even the FBI would not be able to read its customers' correspondence. However, when American and Canadian cops descended on their office, armed with search warrants issued by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, the company violated its principles and gave the authorities the universal decryption key.
— How did they even manage to “catch” him? I heard that Iceman sold dumps under an unknown second nickname Digits, changed his spelling style, sold dumps without a bin list, and only three people knew that Iceman and Digits were the same person.
— For some reason, you think that you are the smartest. But do you know how to beat Garry Kasparov? You have to play any game with him except chess. Many of those who are now resting in prison are racking their brains: “What was my mistake? How did they manage to catch me?” Meanwhile, we are gradually beginning to understand the rules of the game. It is no secret to you that many criminal groups around the world have “emissaries” infiltrated, that spies work at secret enterprises, and that high-ranking officials are followed by informers. It would be strange if the special services, especially the American ones, did not guess to infiltrate their people into the carding community. Now about Iceman. To hack Capital One, one of the largest credit card issuers in the US, he obtained a private 0-day exploit for Internet Explorer from the Russians, and now all that was left to do was to use social engineering to get bank employees to visit a website that contained the exploit. Max chose the name financialedgenews.com for the website. He then sent an email to 500 bank employees (from PR managers to IT specialists) that read: "I'm Mark Tillman, a reporter for Lending News, working on a story about the latest leak of personal data from Capital One customers. I saw the name ... (here is the recipient's full name) in a story from Financial Edge and wanted to talk to you about it: financialedgenews.com. About one hundred twenty-five bank employees "clicked" on the infected link and let the Trojan into their corporate network. FBI agents investigating this incident first of all "punched" the owner of the domain financialedgenews.com. The domain was registered to a "left" name in the state of Georgia, but when the domain registrar, the Go Daddy company, dug into its archives, it saw that this same user had once registered another domain through them - cardersmarket.com. Investigators realized that Iceman, no matter how he tried to distance himself from criminal activity, was the same hacker who, of course, for selfish purposes, hacked the network of the fifth largest issuer of credit cards in the United States. In addition, one of the CardersMarket admins, Th3C0rrupted0ne, turned out to be an informant for Secret Service and sent his curators all the private messages (PM) received from Max through the internal CardersMarket mail. He also said that Iceman, the forum's owner, had a second secret nickname, Digits. Secret Service agents used this information and made a test purchase from Digits. This was enough to bring charges. However, the feds went even further - when Butler's friend and one of the CardersMarket moderators, nicknamed Zebra, sold several dumps to a Secret Service informant known as Gollumfun and was arrested, he was offered the next five years in prison or to tell everything he knew about Iceman. It's not hard to guess what choice Zebra made... He also "gave up" Max's closest partner Christopher Aragon and said that Iceman was using the DriveCrypt program. This meant that even if the agents did figure out Butler's address, they would not find any evidence on his hard drive.
"That's why they put Max under machine guns, not letting him turn off his computers," I interrupted Sushko.
— Yes, that’s right, Chris Aragon made counterfeit plastic cards, wrote Max’s dumps on them, and had a group of young, attractive college-age girls whom he considered the best candidates for shopping with counterfeit “plastic.” However, one day he broke his own rule and went to the store himself. He went into Bloomingdale’s and bought several women’s handbags worth a total of $13,000. The salespeople, being no fools, “flipped” the police just in case. Seventy counterfeit credit cards were found in Christopher’s car, as well as several ecstasy and Xanax pills. Faced with the prospect of spending the rest of his days behind bars — California has a “three strikes and you’re out” law, which provides for life imprisonment for criminals who have previously had two serious convictions and are found guilty of committing any third crime (and Aragon had just his third conviction) — Chris gave a full “layout” and provided a photo of Iceman.
— I see that in America every carder is a snitch, there are only informants around...
— Well, what about it: a similar tactic — using informants — was used against organized crime back in the 1980s.
— But with us, everything is different — there is no such widespread “surrender”…
— And have you seen the American criminal code?! Half of the articles there provide for life imprisonment. So criminals try to ease their lot — about 87% of American defendants admit guilt and surrender everyone and everything in exchange for a slight reduction in their sentence. Here is another document that I would like to familiarize you with, — the investigator reached into his bag and pulled out a letter from the US Department of Homeland Security.
— So who, I ask, asked you to send your personal photos to a partner in a dirty business, provide your brother’s bank account, give your mother’s home address for the shipment of goods, and share details of your personal life? — Vorobyova’s lawyer asked after the investigator left. — You think you're having an innocent conversation, but it won't be hard for your interlocutor to find out what city George Michael's concert was in yesterday, he'll find out your e-mail and that you're connected with the manufacturer of slimbady "plastic"...
— We often give our opponents the tools of our own destruction, — Aesop's saying came to mind...

Chapter 48
Tug of War
They pinned all the dead on me, with the exception of the victims of the world war.
Al Capone
It's always natural for a person to hope for the best, even if his situation is completely hopeless, but I've never received such a blow before — the investigator brought charges against me in which he didn't pin on me the only thing that wasn't Kennedy's murder. Of course, I didn't expect to get off easy after all the "good" I'd done for the "K" department, but for everything to be so bad... I really want to write to Katerina that it's all over, but it's too early — first we need to wait for the results of the trial. I had a dream recently. I didn't remember the contents, but I woke up with a clear and distinct thought: if it's for you, it will withstand everything, but if not, it's better to part ways sooner rather than later.
"The investigator liked the phrase he read in the notebook he confiscated from you," Vorobyova said when the investigation was completed and we began to familiarize ourselves with the materials of my criminal case.
"What phrase exactly?
" "Before I went to prison, I believed that about half of those there were innocent. Now I see that this is not so and 99% of us are guilty of what we are accused of. Another thing is that, in legal terms, many have not been proven guilty," the lawyer quoted. "
Oh, I wrote that down when I was in prison the first time.
— But it very accurately reflects the state of affairs in our judicial system, — Marina Mikhailovna sighed. — When I defend police officers from time to time, they often complain about violations of procedural law in relation to them. Unfortunately, many think about the consequences of their illegal actions only when they themselves find themselves in similar circumstances.
— The Criminal Procedure Code regulates every step of the investigation. And the police work the way they are allowed to work. If in my case the prosecutor's office had admitted that the laptop was confiscated in violation of the Criminal Procedure Code and therefore cannot be evidence, the cops would have worked more carefully next time...
— However, admitting this means that not even half of the cases will reach the court. That is why I have no illusions about your sentence. Unfortunately, we are not in England, where the courts are truly independent, fair and therefore respected, — the lawyer concluded. — True, I must admit that our Department "K" works very professionally...
— Except for the fact that they hung five articles on me where there should have been three, yes. I would put them in second place in the world after the Americans. Judge for yourself: our country is small - everything is under control. The employees of the Department "K" are young, smart and savvy. At the same time, they have repeatedly encountered serious carders, hackers and spammers and have adopted our working methods. Their equipment and software are the most advanced American. Add to this constant conferences, seminars and exchange of experience with European and American colleagues - and there you have the result. True, the fundamental difference between ours and the Americans is that they have huge funding and staff, so they can afford to infiltrate cyber groups, develop us for years, make test purchases and arrest key figures. Thus, they prevent more serious crimes. And the Belarusian cops have to clean up crimes that have already been committed.
— Who do you think are the most dangerous cybercriminals?
— Russians, of course. Russia has very strong hackers. Ukraine has carders, that is, more scammers. And Belarus has plenty of both, and all the very best. True, our business is becoming more dangerous every day: in the fight against cybercrime, law enforcement agencies from different countries interact like in no other area. Although, of course, I do not believe that the special services will ever be able to put an end to cybercrime, just as they cannot completely cope with crime in the real world.

Chapter 49
"Werewolves" in Uniform
With the beginning of summer, I was finally transferred to Volodarka. It was the same environment, the same people and problems as three years ago. As if I had never been released. Deja vu...
In the "sedimentation tank" I accidentally met Vova Boyankov, my old accomplice, who was now involved in the same case with the cops from the "K" department.
- Hi, Vovan! - I was glad to see his familiar unshaven mug. - Well, tell me how you managed to get "warmed up" with the cops.
- And what, you didn't read it in the newspapers?
- Yes, I did. According to BelGazeta, in early 2006, the first deputy head of the "K" department, Sergei Novik, created an organized criminal group whose goal was to steal money from ATMs using counterfeit credit cards made by the defendants. According to the investigators' calculations, during the group's activities — from February 2006 to October 2007 — the defendants stole about $340,000. Artem Burak, who joined the group's activities, began searching the Internet for details of genuine bank plastic cards and their PIN codes, and also consulted Miklashevich on card production, helping to record the obtained data on the magnetic strips of card blanks. According to the Prosecutor General's Office, the organizer of the crimes, Novik, took it upon himself to ensure that the group members always had counterfeit cards, PIN codes, and information about the card accounts of their real owners. Having distributed roles among his accomplices, he allegedly ensured security using his official position. Reading out the charges, the prosecutor touched on Novik's connections with employees of bank processing centers who helped to double-check the implementation of individual transactions made using counterfeit cards. Right?
— Well, in general terms, yes. Novik developed a relatively safe scheme for us, which allowed us to remain free for a long time.
- What is it?
- The first rule was "Don't steal where you live." We withdrew money strictly outside of Belarus (in Russia). Secondly, we were in constant motion: "One day - one city." Half an hour before midnight, you withdraw your entire available balance, then the daily limit of the card is reset, and after twelve you withdraw another balance. After that, the card was thrown away. Despite the fact that it could give cash for many, many more days. This is the third rule.
How did the story end? Bayan got lazy, lost his sense of smell and began working in Belarus. One of the ATMs "swallowed" several cards and, in addition, captured Boyankov's face, which, of course, had long been in all police databases. The cops of the city of Zaslavl, where all this happened, identified Boyankov from a photograph and opened a criminal case. Colonel Novik called Zaslavl and took the case to Minsk, where it was safely "buried." Then Novik and K slapped Bayan in the face and strictly forbade him to work in Belarus. He disobeyed again and got "caught" again. Now a case was opened against him at the Minsk "K" department. Boyankov was offered a couple of years to "rest" in prison. He didn't want to sit alone, and Vova wrote a statement to the Prosecutor General's Office, where he laid out the details of his criminal activity together with Novik and Miklashevich...

Chapter 50
The Ice Has Broken, Gentlemen of the Jury
You know, when I hadn’t seen you for seven or eight months, it was easier than it is now. And now… again, with renewed vigor… I fell in love with you even more. It just tears me apart when I see you and can’t even touch you. I leave these trials, and my nervous system is failing…
From Katya’s letter
The trial began on August 6, a year after I was arrested. Judge Yermoolenkov, a thin, boyish man, only a couple of years older than me, declared twenty minutes into the trial that my guilt had been fully proven and there was no need to ask me any questions.
On August 13, toward the end of the fifth court hearing, the prosecutor finally woke up. He hadn’t said a word during the entire trial, hadn’t asked a single question, and doesn’t even know how to use email, which, however, didn’t stop him from considering my guilt “fully proven” and asking for my punishment of fourteen years and six months in prison. Fourteen and a half years just for selling a few thousand foreign dumps to an American special agent... He's probably been watching too much Highlander, but I'm not Duncan McCloud...
It's a good thing my mother isn't watching this comedy - there are only Katya and Kolya, my best friend, in the audience. They sit staring at the floor, as if they were not family to me at all. Katya nervously fidgets with her purse and can hardly hold back her tears. And Kolya... it's as if he feels guilty for not being able to help me. "Look, look at me," I mentally ask them. "I'm still here, with you. Yes, it's hard. Yes, it's unbearable to take part in this performance, but don't pretend that I no longer exist..."
On the morning of August 24, the day of the verdict, the judge sent a lawyer to me:
- Sergei, Ermoolenkov advises you to fully admit your guilt...
- And in exchange for what?
- You'll get two years less.
- From what number?
— I asked him about it too. He replied: "From the one I had in mind"...
— Marina Mikhailovna, he could have planned fifteen years. Let him go to hell with such proposals. Tell him so.
— Okay...
That same day I was found guilty on all five counts that were in the indictment and given a ten-year sentence. With confiscation of property.
In the evening I wrote to Katya that in light of such a sentence our further relations made no sense...

Chapter 51
What autumn is in the camps...
What autumn is in the camps:
Leaves are thrown onto the "forbidden" area,
And I scream, scream at the snoops:
"Let them lie for another week!.."
Group "Butyrka". What autumn is in the camps
I spent another month in the pretrial detention center after the verdict, and only at the beginning of October they ordered me to be transported.
For some reason, something you wait for so long always turns out to be completely unexpected when it finally happens — my bags were unpacked (every item needs to be described in detail), and my underwear, as luck would have it, was soaked in a basin.
A special wagon for transporting prisoners, a prison wagon, is called a "Stolypin" or simply "Stolypin" in Russia. During the time of Pyotr Stolypin, such wagons were used to transport immigrants to the eastern regions of the country. This type of wagon was lower than a regular passenger wagon, but much higher than a freight wagon; it also had utility rooms for utensils and poultry, and pens for livestock. Later, these slightly re-equipped wagons were adapted for transporting prisoners. Before that, convicts were transported on foot and on horses, and many of them never reached their place of exile, dying along the way.
— What kind of city is this, my dear? — I asked the guard in the manner of Ostap Bender when we stayed longer than usual at one of the stations.
— Orsha. This is your final stop. Zone No. 8. I call out your names and we leave one by one, — the guard chief answered for him.
“The Eight”... Penal Colony No. 8. The “builder” of the pyramids, Sasha Zhdanov, and my old friend Roma Pogartsev (Koster), had been here before me. But I really didn’t like the phrase: “This is your final stop”... The final stop is when there’s a wooden Macintosh and two meters of damp earth on top. Everything else is temporary.
I jumped out of the carriage and looked around: our train was standing on a siding and two paddy wagons were almost right next to it. It was impossible to make out anything in detail — we were surrounded by a line of machine gunners.
There were six of us taken to the “eight.” Those who were less fortunate were sent to the neighboring “tuberculosis” zone #12. The incidence of tuberculosis in Belarusian prisons, if you want to know, exceeds the national average by seven times.
A few minutes later, the car stopped in front of the zone gates. Electric lights appeared, resembling crumpled felt hats, a concrete fence, and a checkpoint bristling with rows of barbed wire. “Welcome to IK-8,” I said to myself and wrapped myself tighter in my fish-skin jacket. It was a shame I left my down jacket at the prison – it would have come in very handy now.
Another roll call awaited us outside the gates: last name, year of birth, term, article. Dark. Cold. Damp. And very uncomfortable. Brrr…
Again the “sedimentation tank” – a three by three cell with a broken window and frost on the walls. Three hours like that. Teeth on the shelf, another search, a three-minute sentence — welcome to hell, guys.
It was getting light around six. The zone was getting up.
— So, convicts (I wonder why the stress is on the first syllable?), — a silly warrant officer who looked like Winnie the Pooh opened the door of the “sedimentation area”, — we’re leaving one by one.
A tiled corridor. And light. Sunny, not electric. My eyelids involuntarily closed my eyes, unaccustomed to natural light after a year and a half in the basements. So, what do we have here?
Flower beds surrounded by brightly painted tires, a bronze bust of Maxim Gorky, brick buildings built in the 1960s, and hundreds of people scurrying back and forth: some with shovels, others with brooms and rakes, others with some red armbands on their sleeves… An anthill of human destinies. Add red flags, balloons, and you’re at a May Day demonstration. “No, this isn’t Rio de Janeiro,” I thought, “this is much worse.”
They led us to the supply room. What was it? An ordinary warehouse, where each of us was given the required aluminum mug, spoon, waffle towel, bed linen yellowed with age, a mattress, pillow, and blanket, work (not prison) overalls, tarpaulin boots, and a green quilted jacket sewn from old soldier’s wadded pants.
Then there was the "quarantine" - a separate two-story building, where everyone with whom we had arrived in the zone together would spend the next few weeks before being assigned to detachments.
- So, convicts, - instead of greeting, the small, pot-bellied chief of the "quarantine", nicknamed Rollton, began, - leave your bags, change into your new uniform and go out for inspection.
- What kind of inspection? - I asked someone.
- A miscalculation, is everything in place. In the morning and in the evening. And in the "quarantine" generally four times a day.
- I need to get some sleep, chief, - was heard from the crowd.
- Well, after the inspection and breakfast, you can get some sleep, - answered Rollton. - If you sign the papers ...
"Papers" turned out to be "Individual obligation to strive for law-abiding behavior." It looked like this:
"I, convict Pupkin, during my stay in places of deprivation of liberty undertake to:
= voluntarily comply with the regime and legal requirements;
= participate in the social life of the unit;
= regularly perform landscaping and collective self-service work;
= take good care of the property of the institution;
= eradicate bad habits;
= observe safety regulations at work and at home;
= fulfill production standards and tasks at the places specified by the technical staff.
"Divide and conquer," says an ancient Roman proverb. Whether to sign the "papers" or not is a personal matter for each convict. They were, of course, invented by the cops in order to divide the prisoners into two opposing camps. On the one hand, without the "papers" you will not be released early. On the other hand, prisoners who do not sign them formally occupy a place in the criminal hierarchy above those who agreed to the demands of the administration. Although signing the "papers" does not mean that you must comply with the rules specified in them. Those who did not sign proudly call themselves "decent." Everyone else is "goats" for them.
My days in the "quarantine" were unusually monotonous: hungry, cold and uncertain. Canteen three times a day, idiotic lectures in the club on the topics: "Protect yourself", "Man among people", "Formula of human happiness", "The meaning of life" ... The purpose of our stay in the colony was clearly formulated by Captain Rollton: "Your task is to violate the internal regulations as little as possible, and ours is to supposedly correct you and expel you on parole as soon as possible."
Distribution into units in the "quarantine" is awaited like manna from heaven: what's in this unit? - ah, a "seamstress". And in that one? - "wooden". In which unit is the "local" bigger? I want to go to that one, and I'm in this one - I have fellow countrymen there, etc. I was assigned to the seventh.
Let me make it clear right away that I will not describe everything I saw in the camp - a detailed description would take more than one book, and I cannot yet write with the skill of Solzhenitsyn. A modern camp is little different from what Shalamov, Dovlatov or Solzhenitsyn saw. In addition, until you have been in the zone yourself, no description, even the most talented, will help you understand what it really is. Therefore, I will only tell you what caught my eye, a modern young man without any particular prejudices, previously unfamiliar with the Soviet camp system.

Chapter 52
Why work if you can not work?
Work is not a wolf, it will not run away into the forest.
Folk wisdom
Abroad, the main type of correctional institution is a prison. In our country, there is a correctional colony, also known as a zone, or, in Soviet terms, a camp. Today, colonies remain only on the territory of the former USSR, in India and Israel. Even Russia plans to abandon colonies from 2012: for dangerous criminals there will be prisons, for everyone else - colony settlements, where you can live with your family.
In fact, our modern penal system is built on the ideology of the GULAG. Colonies are the heirs of the Soviet camps, when it was believed that a criminal could be reformed by forced labor. The detachment system (80-130 people in one detachment) was justified by the theory that labor and the beneficial influence of the collective are the best means of education. At that time, the camp system was a continuation of the Soviet power, one of the levers of pressure and obtaining cheap labor. The USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs provided one sixth of the income part of the budget of a huge country. It was profitable for the Soviet Union to have exactly this kind of system, where every prisoner was obliged to produce something, it was profitable to keep people who were guilty of something behind barbed wire.
Today, everything has changed outside, but in prison, it remains the same. “Prisoner labor is no longer used for economic gain,” the management of correctional institutions declares. “It should help a person adapt to society and instill in him work skills.” They are lying. And it is used in many ways. True, labor employment in Belarusian colonies is only 40% — prison labor is not in great demand. In addition, there is one significant contradiction in the issue of prisoner employment: convicts who are employed in production must pay for their own maintenance (75% of their earnings are deducted), while the state pays for those prisoners who are not employed in the “promka.” The question arises: why work if you can not work?
The “promka,” or production zone, is separated from the residential area of the camp by a fence with barbed wire. In our zone, there is a woodworking shop (“wooden shop”), a “tool shop” (almost the only surviving production of twenty-liter steel canisters in the Union) and a “sewing shop.” In Europe, the state is obliged to provide people in prison with the same wages and working conditions as they do outside. Here, it’s good if you get paid $5 a month.
Dan lives in my section. He’s a thirty-year-old drug addict. He smoked weed in a group of three. He gave one a joint, took a drag himself, and passed it on to another. As a result, he got two cases of distribution, Article 328.3 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, a term of eight years. Of course, judges understand that giving eight years for one joint is too much, but their hands are tied by the framework of the Criminal Code — Part 3 of Article 328 starts at eight years.
Dan has no citizenship. Which means he’ll have to sit “until the bell rings.” For four years, he toiled six days a week at a sewing shop, sewing mittens and aprons. He’s due to be released in a week. His only relative, a 99-year-old grandmother, died without waiting for him for four months. Dan didn’t save any money for all those years of “shock” work. Upon release, of course, he will be given five dollars for the road, but he has nowhere to go. No relatives, no money, no documents. A vicious circle. Now guess the riddle: in how many days will Dan steal something? The correct answer: in two days. On the first day, the fear of ending up behind bars again will still be great, but then hunger, a very serious argument, will take its toll and Dan will pick someone's pocket. Or a bag. And he will go to jail. He will get out - and go to jail again. And he will sit there all his life, cursing his fate, the authorities and our "correctional" system.

Chapter 53
Strict Regime Zone
Prison is just the tip of the iceberg. The berries are the camp. It is there that you will have to break or, having bent, reborn, adapt.
A. Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago
What is a maximum security zone? A place I can tell you almost everything about, but you still won’t understand anything until you’ve been there. A place where everything is turned upside down and doesn’t obey common sense. Where pants are called “shkars,” boots are called “kotsy,” a stool is called a “skeleton,” and a jacket is called a “klift.” Where you are entitled to two 30-kg parcels per year, two small packages, two long-term and the same number of short-term visits with your family. A place where an operative thinks for you, and you must “know your place in the line, not talk, and only follow orders.” Where you have no rights, only responsibilities.
The Soviet leaders failed to build communism throughout the world, including the USSR. But they did manage to do it in the camps. The same humiliating clothes, humiliatingly low wages, leveling in lawlessness and complete social stability: they feed you, clothe you, and guard you on top of that. When you're free, you have to figure out for yourself how to feed yourself, where to live and what to wear. That's why most prisoners are afraid of freedom. Freedom scares them with its boundless diversity. They say: "Where am I going to go?.."
In the zone, their routes were determined for many years. A clear, closed circle: medical unit - barracks - dining room - "tool room". They know the camp world well and are completely unaware of the other, free world. That's why when you meet people who don't want to be released, it doesn't cause wild bewilderment. Many people liked it in the USSR, too.
Those who are not serving their first sentences serve their sentences in the "eight". In Belarus, they have recently separated first-timers from those who have previously served time in camps. It seems to me that they are acting absolutely correctly, since in the same Russia, if a person is convicted under a serious article, he immediately gets into a strict zone, with repeat offenders, and thus the prison turns into a "forge of crime".
The morning begins with getting up at 6:00. At 7 o'clock - morning calculation. Then breakfast in the canteen. Then individually: some go to work, others to sleep, and some just walk in the "local". Horizontal bar, parallel bars, illegal "iron" - homemade dumbbells and barbells, a bathhouse - six taps with sluggish water, books, church services, TV with the same films and idiotic music videos - if you are not toiling away at the "industrial zone", you can devote the whole day to yourself. But that's for us, on the "eight" - on other assignments you'll be taken out to the club four times a day for all sorts of "educational" events, not to mention the obligatory trip to the canteen. The day ends at 10 p.m.
The entire territory of the zone is divided into a number of local sections, each of which contains barracks - dormitories for two detachments. Each barrack has sections - sleeping rooms, a Lenin room - it has a TV, a washbasin, a toilet, a storage room and an office for the detachment commander (in our language - the detachment leader). The bunks in the sections are located in two tiers.
We must move around the colony in an organized manner, in formation, or alone - only upon receiving permission from the administration. But if you wish, it is not difficult to get into another detachment.
On the territory of the residential zone there is also a club, a canteen, a bathhouse, a medical unit, a library, an evening school, the headquarters of the camp authorities and a church. Along the perimeter, the zone is limited by two "forbidden areas" - strips of dug and leveled earth that well preserve the traces of anyone who steps on it, barbed wire and towers with machine gunners.
In Europe, prisoners are often allowed to wear their own clothes. Already twenty years ago, the European penitentiary rules stated that "the clothing of prisoners should in no case be disgraceful or humiliating. In addition, the unfamiliarity and monotony of the prison uniform can only aggravate the feeling of bitterness."
In the Belarusian zone, everything is different. Household items that were commonplace outside are given a new, exaggerated meaning here due to their shortage. The zone has its own scale of material and moral values. A head of cabbage evokes no less emotion here than an exquisite restaurant dish, and a new tracksuit makes you look rich in the eyes of others. Knitted sweaters and polo shirts are prohibited here - only collarless T-shirts are allowed. You cannot lower the "ears" on your fur hat or raise the collar of your quilted jacket (then it is unclear why they even exist). Dishwashing detergent, shower gel, various "washes", deodorants and even toothpicks are prohibited. But you can have tooth powder, which I have not seen on sale for about twenty years. There is one answer to all the uncomfortable questions: "Not allowed."
Porn magazines (in our language - "murzilki") and any publications with a hint of eroticism are prohibited here. Playboy, which is available at every Soyuzpechat kiosk, is not given to me — the head of the colony considers it pornography. “We’ll put it in storage, and when you’re released, you’ll have something to read on the train,” they tell me at the library. And it’s true — in ten years, a year’s worth of Playboy will be a collector’s item. The head of the colony, the chief censor, also applies this definition to FHM, XXL, Maxim, and even… Men’s Health magazines.
If it weren’t for televisions, DVD players, and mobile phones, you’d never believe you’re in the 21st century.

Chapter 54
Not All Day Is Shrovetide for the Cat
Recently, I came across some interesting statistics: what do convicts in our camp dislike? It turned out that 24% were dissatisfied with the treatment in the medical unit, 52% with the food, and 33% with the mechanism for receiving parcels and packages.
The medical unit in our camp is located in the same building as the “quarantine.” Doctors' offices, a treatment room, a laboratory, an operating room and several inpatient wards. True, all this is on the third floor, and it is sometimes difficult for an elderly person (we have a separate group of old people and invalids, we call them "Vikings") to get up there.
Of course, prisoners complain that the medical unit does not have the necessary medicines and that they are treated poorly - but this is a well-known disease of free medicine in the wild, and even more so in prison. In addition, a feature of correctional institutions in Belarus is the detachment system of detention, not the cell system, where forty people can be in one section - with such overcrowding, tuberculosis infection occurs very quickly. By the way, the mechanism of tuberculosis development has not yet been identified. It is only known that Koch's bacillus - the causative agent of the disease - is present in the body of every third inhabitant of the Earth, but what exactly "awakens" it and causes the development of the disease is still unknown. Whoever solves this mystery will receive the Nobel Prize.
They feed us three times a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner. And they feed us, according to old inmates, not badly - ten years ago, even half of that was in the rations. For breakfast, oatmeal cooked in milk, pearl barley, and more and more often recently, chopped porridge and "kombikasha" - a mix of oatmeal, chopped porridge and pearl barley. For lunch, they give some tasteless soup consisting of water and a small amount of beets and cabbage (not a single potato), for the second course - darkened macaroni horns with scraps of pork or chicken skins, potatoes mixed with sauerkraut or peas again with pearl barley. It is not clear why not give peas today and pearl barley tomorrow? It is necessary to mix them, like pigs ...
All three dishes - the first, second and compote - have to be eaten from one aluminum "helmet", and there is nowhere to wash it between changing dishes. As, incidentally, and hands before eating. At least it is good that they are steamed - not tasty, but healthy food.
For dinner they give boiled potatoes, cabbage and the same "combined porridge" as for breakfast. Often they give boiled fish. Unfortunately, only the smell of meat remains - the canteen workers, the same prisoners, steal and sell. Seven hundred grams of boiled chicken can be bought for two packs of Winston cigarettes. True, it is very difficult to "break through" such a channel. Because in the camp everything is in plain sight, and the envy of some does not allow others to live. Therefore, if you have gotten hold of something, what loophole you have found - keep quiet! Keep quiet, otherwise the neighbors will find out - they will trample you.
You can buy everything for cigarettes in the zone. Starting from milk (half a pack per liter) and ending with a mobile phone. The main unit of payment is Winston. A bucket of "potatoes" costs four Winstons, a diet for a month (half a loaf of white bread, a "puck" of butter and 650 grams of milk every day) costs twelve packs. The diet is sold by people who have been prescribed it for medical reasons.
I make kefir from milk: I put a bag of milk on the radiator and wait for it to turn sour. If you leave it for an extra day, you can get some pretty good cottage cheese. You can make some pretty good borscht from the beetroot salad that's sold at the local kiosk. You add a couple of potatoes, fry some lard and onions, and cook it all on a homemade illegal electric stove. We make cutlets from the fish that's given to us in the canteen. We grow kombucha from sweet tea. The drink that comes from it has recently gained recognition all over the world and is called "kombucha." Something like low-alcohol rice beer is made from rice mushrooms.
There are practically no vegetables or fruits in the zone, and for some reason they don't give out sugar. They don't sell it in the facility's store either. The cops say that this is to stop us from making home-brewed mash. Of course, you can get sugar. True, it will cost $3-5 per 1 kg. Sugar substitutes are also not allowed. Because of the alcohol experiments, honey is also prohibited, although if someone wants to drink, jam and caramel are freely sold in the kiosk. You add homemade yeast, water and put it in a warm place...
You don't have to go to the canteen yourself. For $3-5 a month, specially trained people bring your rations to the unit. They are dismissively called "horses." More affectionately - "helpers." Some of them are paid more, others less, and others even wash dishes for this money. Market relations have crept behind bars. Of course, some work for free - out of fear.
Some products can be bought in the institution's store. "Otovarka" - that's what we call this difficult procedure - twice a month. Why "difficult"? Because the store is only two by three meters, and sometimes up to thirty people cram in there. No more than half of them are real buyers, the rest are just curious. The state allows us to spend about $40 a month on ourselves. If you have a criminal claim against you, the amount of the "goods" is reduced tenfold. For this money, you need to manage to buy food, tea, cigarettes, toilet paper, pens, envelopes, and much more. Moreover, all the goods in the kiosk are of the lowest quality - the prisoners have no choice, whatever you give them, they will still buy up.
Of course, the limit on the amount of "goods" can be bypassed. No one prevents you from sending money to the personal account of a person who does not have a claim and who is not warming himself from freedom.
The same applies to the restriction on the number of parcels. They are handed out through a small window on the street for only two hours a day. Meanwhile, outside, where you are waiting for your turn (where would we be without lines in a communist system!), it can be minus thirty… They don’t let you have many of the things that are allowed even in a pretrial detention center: seasonings, instant cereals, honey, powdered milk, mashed potatoes, persimmons, pomegranates, grapes, raisins and much more. Knorr, it turns out, is not a broth, ask your relatives for “Galina Blanka”… The cops might be happy to give us everything that comes in parcels, but their list of permitted items dates back to the 1980s, which is reissued over and over with minor changes and which still includes tooth powder…

Chapter 55
A Good Life Doesn’t Make You a Writer
“Is it true that all journalists dream of writing a novel?” “No,” I lied.
S. Dovlatov. Compromise
From the moment we are born, time is all we have. People can take things from us, deprive us of property, but no one - except at the cost of murder - can deprive us of time, unless we ourselves give it to someone. Even in prison, our time belongs to us if we use it for our own purposes.
I am reading Robert Greene's book "33 Strategies of War" and thinking about the strategy of my liberation. I use not only all the intelligence I have, but also the one I can borrow. I have protected myself from communicating with people I don't like, I rarely leave the section and almost all the time I write a book.
I began working on it a long time ago, from the first days of my stay in the Zhodino pre-trial detention center. True, at that time it looked like notes about my beloved woman, thoughts about recent events, everything that worried me and that I, of course, could not discuss with my cellmates. It was as if I was reliving the moments I was describing, and it really helped me during my first months in prison. Why did I do it? I didn’t really know myself, I just couldn’t sit around doing nothing. And then I came across an interview with Sergei Yursky, the best actor to play Ostap Bender: “A book is not written or a play is staged to hammer certain ideas into someone’s head, but to show the reader or viewer an example. A variety of examples: good, evil, the relationship between good and evil, an analysis of what is hidden in a person and is now being brought out.” Honestly, I think that the ten years of my life that I devoted to crime were wasted. The price you have to pay for a few years of a fun and comfortable existence is too high. One of the advantages of mature age is that you finally begin to understand what is important to you. It’s hard to understand this at twenty.
Just six months ago, it seemed to me that I had no choice: they would give me a term – apparently, a considerable one – and I would have to sit. Five or six years. Without violations. And be released on parole. I could not afford such a “luxury”.
I called the second option “banging my head against the wall”: write complaints, present arguments and ask to knock three or four years off. Later, remembering how all my appeals to various judicial authorities ran into a wall of rejection, I abandoned this idea due to its obvious futility.
Therefore, I chose the third year, relying partly on reason, partly on intuition – to finish writing the book, ask for pardon and do everything so that my request would reach the royal ears. In addition, working on the book helped me not to go crazy, allowed me to fence myself off from the camp “everyday life” and not notice all the bastards who surround me here.
Writers don't become writers because of a good life...

Chapter 56
Femme fatale
She smells like angels probably do... Lord, how I've been waiting for this moment... maybe not here and not now, but I've dreamed of Katya becoming my wife one fine day.
In strict regime, there are two long (up to three days) and two short (through glass and a telephone receiver) visits per year. If you don't sit idly by, you can get four more as an incentive and thus see your family every two months. To do this, you need to actively participate in the life of the unit: draw postcards and wall newspapers, play checkers and chess, defend the honor of the unit in sports competitions, sing karaoke or read poetry, or do something for the zone, such as repairs in the barracks, or slave away at the "promka".
The opportunity to see your loved ones costs $20 a day - that's how much you have to pay for a room in the camp hotel. A suite in the best hotel in Gomel is cheaper.
“I came to you from a fairy tale,” Katya told me when the official part of our wedding, including the exchange of rings, the obligatory “I pronounce you husband and wife,” and some of the brides’ inappropriate wedding dresses, was over and we found ourselves in our room.
“Which one?
” “The kind one,” Katya smiled her most cunning smile.
“Kicked out? Just kidding. But seriously, which one?
” “I… I came from a thriller.
” “Do you remember how we met?
” “Of course I remember. Your nickname on Mamba was Versus.
” “Maybe you also know what “versus” is?”
“I know, it’s Versace’s second line.
”
“Versus is Latin for “against.” Do you see how smart your wife is?
” “And the most beautiful too…” I kissed Katya on the lips and pushed her onto the bed.
She hasn't changed at all in the year and a half that have passed since I hugged her for the last time. But now her eyes have become even more familiar and close. God, why all this punishment? She says that she lives only in the hope that I will find a way to get out of here soon, that she needs me there, at home, next to her, that she sometimes scolds herself for waiting for me, wasting years of her life, but she can't do anything about it.
On the first day of a "date" all your senses are still asleep: you don't feel smell or taste - all this will return only the next day. And you are always in a hurry: it seems that you won't have time to talk enough and enjoy each other, as they will come for you. And on the third day it turns out that this time is quite enough. Not for us, prisoners - I would go for a week - no checks, no cops' faces, you wake up not from the sound of a siren, but from the kiss of your beloved woman - but for our relatives it is hard.
— If they had locked me up, I probably would have died for sure, — Katya said on the third day. — There’s nowhere to go, everything is fenced in, even the sky is “in a cage”... If only there were some kind of window that looked out beyond the zone, so I could see people walking around... it would be easier. And my sides are already hurting from the “bed rest.”
— Did you bring me the book I asked for? — I interrupted Katya. — “Walled Up” by Ivan Mironov.
— Yeah.
— Give it to me.
— By the way, we can tell fortunes with it.
— How?
— Very simple: take a book you haven’t read yet, think of a page number and a line, open it and read. People sometimes look for answers to their questions in the Bible in a similar way. Go ahead, you go first.
— Okay, page 202, first line from the top.
— Seryozhenka, do you want me to give it to you three times?
— You’re asking! Of course I do.
— No, it’s written in the book. Here, look...
- It doesn't matter, come here...
The interiors of the "date" are very reminiscent of a dormitory from the 1980s. Two showers, which for some reason are closed after 10 p.m. Two Soviet refrigerators in the kitchen, cast-iron kettles hewn with an axe, aluminum frying pans and pots, antediluvian electric stoves - and access to this wealth is also blocked after ten. The question is, why? Okay, we, prisoners, are used to everything, but free, innocent people come to us, who, moreover, pay $20 a day for the opportunity to be with us.
The toilets are terrible (it's better not to describe), only hot water flows from all the taps (and even the toilet cisterns), and you need to turn the valves for ten minutes to achieve a more or less acceptable temperature.
There is only one cleaning person for thirty rooms in our Hilton, so there is no trace of even minimal cleanliness here. There are no dishes in the rooms, you even have to bring your own mugs and spoons. There are TVs in only five rooms, the rest have Belarusian radio, and not in all of them. Instead of curtains, there are two dirty scraps of purple fabric, and those are only… ten centimeters wide. Sagging, creaking bedspreads, bedspreads all covered in suspicious stains, and disconnected (and this is in March!) radiators.
“Are you aware that your phone is being tapped?” I asked Katya before parting.
“Yes, I know, … I told you. But I don’t understand – why? You’re already in prison…
” “Apparently, they want to track down my brother. Although they won’t succeed – even I don’t know where he is. Remember how Grandpa Lenin wrote letters from prison?”
— ?..
— Although how would you know, in your time they didn’t teach about Lenin in schools anymore… He wrote them with milk, which he poured into an inkwell made of bread crumb. When a warden caught him doing this once, Vladimir Ilyich simply ate the inkwell. In order to read the text written in milk, the paper with the message must be held over a candle flame. Or ironed — it’s more convenient. Instead of milk, you can use lemon juice — the effect is the same. So if you ever receive a letter from me marked in an unusual way, warm it up with an iron.
— All this is stressful, of course, Seryozha… You can’t talk about personal things anymore…
Katya cried on my shoulder for two nights in a row, and I calmed her down, promising that everything would soon be fine between us. Although, to be honest, I had tears in my eyes at that moment. But a woman shouldn’t see a man’s tears. If I were alone, it would be easier. They gave me a term, and I sit there. And now I am responsible for her future.
Abroad, the leadership of the penitentiary system strives to ensure that prisoners maintain closer ties with their families and the outside world. This helps to break the feeling of isolation that is inevitable when deprived of freedom, and gives the prisoner the opportunity to return to society relatively easily. We have two telephone conversations a month and two long "visits" a year. And even those can be deprived of their freedom for some offense ...

Chapter 57
Their Morals
I am the figurehead chairman Funt. I have always been in prison. I sat under Alexander II "the Liberator", under Alexander III "the Peacemaker", under Nicholas II "the Bloody" ... - and the old man slowly bent his fingers, counting the tsars.
From the film "The Golden Calf"
We rarely see that our problems are caused by our own stupidity and wrong actions. We need to blame someone or something – those around us, the authorities, the gods, circumstances, and then salvation must come from outside. For Belarusian prisoners, everything is the fault of… Lukashenko. At the same time, they often like to repeat: “But in America…”
What about America?! In California, they give from twenty-five to life for a third conviction, and our prisoners have eight convictions at the age of twenty-three - and nothing. Or take the American supermax prisons, where prisoners are constantly in their cells, eat there, and are allowed to exercise or watch TV for only half an hour a day. It's certainly easier in a colony than in a cell system!
In Italy, mafia bosses who end up in prison are completely cut off from communication with the outside world, are under constant video surveillance, and the only visitors they are allowed to communicate with in person are their lawyers.
Of course, we are not yet in Holland, where each prisoner has a room of about 12 square meters, with a shower, toilet, sink, refrigerator, TV and radio, more reminiscent of a room in a three-star hotel. Where the menu is determined by the prisoner himself: vegetable, meat, fish dishes, soups, fruits, compote, juices. You can spend about 400 euros a month in the prison store, and this artificial limitation is set only so that the convicts who do not "warm themselves" from freedom do not feel disadvantaged. They are required to work and all work at least four hours a day. Each prisoner earns about 80 euros a month. Work is included in the program so that a person does not become lazy and feels like a useful member of society. The state costs 100-150 euros a day to maintain one prisoner (in the US - $70-110, in Belarus - $5). In Holland, the main reason a person is in prison is simply to serve a term or to change himself, his behavior, his inclinations.
The main goal of most prisoners in the Belarusian zone is survival, so intrigue and the desire to take a better place are common. "Private" places in the zone are, of course, the canteen, bathhouse, club and all sorts of warehouses. When solving any issue that depends on him, a hardened convict will definitely create the appearance of a problem out of thin air, will create a deep fog. It's in the nature of prisoners: to inflate their value with stories. Everyone here is a hypocrite. You're sitting in the section, pouring yourself some milk into a mug. Someone comes in:
- Bon appetit!
- But I don't eat anything! - you answer him.
- And I just in case, so as not to seem impolite...
Most of our prisoners lack a culture of behavior, nutrition, communication. If the cops did not force them to at least sometimes get a haircut, shave and take care of their appearance, many would turn into pigs. It seems that many inmates have even seen running water only in prison. A washbasin is for washing, not for cleaning fish or throwing bread into it. And if you make a remark, you learn a lot about yourself. And everyone likes to repeat: "But before..." - and give advice. This is the kind of state we were raised by - the Soviet one.
Rumors spread so fast here that within an hour the entire zone is talking about something. This is probably the only place in the world where sound travels faster than light. What do they talk about? Mostly about amnesties and the relaxation of certain laws. We make it up ourselves, we believe it ourselves.
A peculiarity of the criminal world of Belarus is that there are practically no professional criminals here - people who live only by crime. All our thieves in law have either been in the ground for a long time or are bypassing Belarus, and the remaining "authorities" are reliably packed into "covered" ones. All the rest are "gentlemen of fortune": stole, drank - went to prison. With such people "you can't steal, you can't guard".
For example, a neighbor in the section borrows a couple of packs of cigarettes from you. For you, this is a trifle, besides, at first in the zone it is difficult for you to refuse someone, to say a firm "no". You still think that people are better than they really are, and that in the maximum security zone everyone should be responsible for their words. But it turns out like in the movie "A Bronx Tale", when the mafioso Sonny, seeing how his protégé Cologero stopped the car, got out of it and chased after some kid, asks:
- What are you doing?
- He owes me $ 20, - answers Cologero.
- If you can’t change the situation, change your attitude towards it. If someone owes you $ 20, but is in no hurry to pay it back, take it as a divine sign. After all, you got off easy, paying only $ 20 to never see this scoundrel again and have nothing to do with him ...
The cops here do not keep their word either. You give Rollton an application, for example, to marry your beloved. A day, two, a week - silence. "Where is the application?!" - you ask Rollton. "I took it to the boss," the fat captain replies. And then it turns out that he cut the lard off your application and threw it all away.
Half the country is sitting,
Half the country is guarding them,
And I would like to become a free bird.
Maybe an article awaits you, too,
And a free life awaits someone else...

Chapter 58
Correctional Trial
"What are you doing?" Katya once asked me on the phone.
"I'm drawing a wall newspaper.
" "What are you drawing?!
"A wall newspaper...
" "Are you completely nuts? The guy is thirty years old, and he draws a wall newspaper...
" "Yesterday I took part in a poetry reading competition. Like in first grade, damn it... They awarded me a diploma.
" "Yeah... straight back to the USSR...
" "And this is the USSR. Everything here is like in the 1960s. Wall newspapers, posters, visual agitation, propaganda... Everything is false and artificial. And certainly no one in the 21st century needs...
" "What else are you doing there?" Do you even have a library?
- Yes, there is a library. But there is nothing to read in it. I am not interested in Russian classics - I read them at school, and Dontsov and Marinina - even more so. The rest of the collection is the works of the classics of Marxism-Leninism...
I recently wrote to the Ministry of Education to ask if I could study at a university remotely while behind bars. It turned out that I could, but “in practice, this process is not organized.” Although in neighboring Russia, prisoners freely graduate from institutes while “doing” their time.
The worst thing in the camp is isolation from society and idleness. As a result, there is gradual degradation. After a year, you catch yourself thinking that you have difficulty finding words when talking to someone on the outside. Phrases are no longer as coherent as before. In some Belarusian zones, there are English and computer literacy courses, but in our “eight” there is one computer for the entire zone. And access to it is strictly prohibited.
I remember Mikhail Samuilovich Lyukhter, a senior instructor for educational work, a pretty good guy, came before the New Year and said:
- Guys, someone from the detachment needs to buy a few New Year's gifts: we'll send them to your children for the holiday.
So I took five. I signed the cards, put them inside each gift and waited for them to be sent. A day, two, a week. In mid-February, we ate these sweets ourselves.
This is, you see, a "corrective process" ...

Chapter 59
The Path to Early Release
The newspaper "Trudovoy Put", which we call "goat's path" or "bitch" and which we are voluntarily and forcibly forced to subscribe to, tells us: "Paying off a claim is the path to release", and posters hang all over the zone: "Convicts, attention! Compensation for moral and material damage is one of the most important criteria for parole" ...
In France, about 40% of convicts are released on parole every year. In Russia, it is about 10%. According to the Belarusian Criminal Code, one can leave the zone early only if the damage caused by the crime is fully compensated. From the state's point of view, this is an absolutely correct measure. On the other hand, from what income should a prisoner pay the claim? From a salary of $5?! 80% of convicts have claims, so no more than 3% of the total number of prisoners leave our zone for parole.
In a Dutch prison, the term of imprisonment is divided into three phases: preventive, middle, and final. If a person behaves well in the first phase, the judge transfers him to the middle phase. In this phase, the prisoner is given the opportunity to spend the weekend at home. The most liberal is the final phase: in it, the convict can work in the city during the day and return to prison in the evening, that is, in fact, he is in prison only five nights a week.
Each case of violation of the law in Holland is considered individually. It is not enough to know that a person robbed a store because he needed money: many need it, but only a few commit robberies. For the Dutch, it is important what prompted a person to solve his problems in this way, what is the underlying motivation for the act. This is the philosophical approach to education.
If a prisoner's behavior in France does not cause complaints (is exemplary), he can take advantage of the benefit of reducing his sentence by three months annually, and if he is also a first-time convict, then he is entitled to another additional benefit in the form of an annual two-month reduction in sentence. Thus, a first-time convict with exemplary behavior actually serves only fourteen months of a two-year prison sentence, and this is without any parole. At one time, something similar existed in Belarus (the so-called "offsets"), but then they abandoned them due to the constantly tightening penal policy.
In America, the same judge who hears your criminal case sets the term of your parole. Hamza Zaman, my American accomplice, who got four years, will be eligible for parole in three years. Max Ray Butler, who got thirteen years, will be eligible for parole in eleven. Another friend of mine only needs to serve two years out of twelve…
The parole system that exists in Belarus today has come down to us almost unchanged from the times of the GULAG. True, if in Stalin's camps it was enough to serve two-thirds of the sentence, then today I, convicted under an especially serious article (we get more for karting than for murder), have already served three-quarters. Despite the fact that I have no claim and I have not caused any harm to the citizens or interests of Belarus.
The possibility of parole for prisoners should be approached individually, after many conversations between the convicts and qualified educators and psychologists. Because today it doesn’t matter what’s in a person’s head – he must serve half, two-thirds or three-quarters of his sentence before being released on parole, depending on the severity of the article. And whether he has reformed or not, what thoughts he has when he is released – no one cares. Everyone is lumped together! The same haircuts, the same suits from the Komintern factory, the same Volgas and Zhiguli… We don’t put people in jail for reform, but for neutralization, for pure isolation.
Belarusian laws are generally paradoxical in many ways.
Take, for example, Article 881 of our Criminal Code: stole a million from the state, got caught, repaid one and a half million and… go for a walk.
I only caused damage to the United States, but I still can’t take advantage of the “benefits” that Article 881 offers. Because the Criminal Code simply didn’t consider such a situation.
For the 65th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War, another amnesty was issued in Belarus (we call it "massukha"). My particularly serious Article 212 falls under it in the following way: I must pay off the claim, serve one third of my sentence, and then go for a walk, Vasya. Clean! That is, the state is giving me the opportunity to be released after serving just over three of my "ten." If only I could pay off the claim. Great! Give me an account to transfer the money to. I'll borrow from friends if that's not enough. True, my sentence also includes other articles that are much milder than the main one, but they are not covered by the amnesty. In conditions where the average prison term in our country is over eight years, and 47% of prisoners are convicted of economic crimes, such contradictions in the laws are simply unacceptable...

Chapter 60
New Year's Eve Without a Phone!
At the beginning of 2011, I was still working on the book. It took me much longer to write it than I expected. The hardest thing about writing is to express your thoughts briefly, but clearly, and not to delve into your own experiences, and not to forget that the book is being written for others.
I finally got my own phone, a Nokia n97. I hide it in a specially equipped “stash” — under a false curtain in the window frame. You understand, of course, that if I wanted to continue selling dumps, I could do all this from my phone. Instead, I write the book day after day. And I even tore out the list of my debtors from my notebook. After all, why did I go to jail for the second time? When I was released from Volodarka, I was not going to return to carding. I started working on creating vodka and took up spam and advertising. At the time of my release, my former partners and clients owed me about $400,000. Many of them had no way to return the money and asked me to provide them with “material” for work so that they could pay off faster. I had to supply them with dumps and gradually take back my own. So I didn’t even notice how I returned to carding again. It’s like with the habit of smoking: you “quit”, you haven’t smoked for six months, and then you take one or two puffs – and in a week you’re back in the “system”.
Only those who can afford them have phones in the zone. They cost ten times more here than outside. So God willing, there will be ten “phones” in the entire camp. But if you want, you can get at least an iPhone. In some zones there are more, in others – fewer, in others – phones are not shown in official documents at all, but the fact is that they are there even in the “reddest” Belarusian camp. They get into the zone in three ways: “by throwing” – when the phone is placed in a coffee can, the free space is filled with polyurethane foam, all this is tightly wrapped in cellophane “with bubbles” and tape and thrown over the fence; “by foot” – they bring garbage, which is extremely rare now, since Shulgin, the current head of the camp, has reduced corruption in the camp to zero; and through hired craftsmen at the “industrial complex”. True, having your own “phone” in the zone is becoming more and more dangerous every day. The reason is all in one person - an overly ambitious "regime officer" who, before joining the regime unit, worked as the head of the camp bakery.
The first time I saw him was when I was still in "quarantine": some young, narcissistic cop turned us away from the canteen and made us march back - like, "the camp chief is watching you through a video camera."
- Who is this clown? - I asked one of the guys in the line.
- Fedonenkov. "Nickname" - General. They say he is married to Shulgin's niece, so he is trying to curry favor, the bastard...
Before the Baker appeared (now we call Fedonenkov only that way), cell phones in the camp were never hidden further than the nightstand. Now the "shakes" never stop, day or night.
At first, I would get hold of Pekar's work schedule and call only when he was not in the zone, but in the second month Pekar simply began to live here, and none of the prisoners knew when he worked and when he rested. That was when the night raids began (they had never frisked anyone after 10 p.m. before) and various masquerade tricks began: at night, the cops would change into prison overalls and quilted jackets, return from dinner with the crowd of prisoners, and upon reaching the detachment, they would immediately throw off their "telaga" (so that the police uniform would be visible) and run to the "telephone operators" section. At one time, calendars with the slogan "Pekar and Co. - New Year's without a phone!" were even circulating around the zone.
"Where are my texts?" I asked Fedonenkov a couple of days after he had suddenly, for no apparent reason, taken my working materials for the book.
"From the camp commander. " If he hasn't thrown them out yet, of course... Take them from him.
- Oh, I'm not going to distract serious people from their work. You took two notebooks - I'll write three. You take them too - you're in good standing with the boss, you're allowed to do anything - I won't stop writing anyway. And you won't erase anything from my memory.
— Aren’t you tired of it? You’re just looking for adventures... Why do you need to write about the camp? By the way, I didn’t like the way you spoke about me: “He’s ambitious, dreams of the position of deputy minister of internal affairs, although his ceiling is deputy chief of the colony for security and operational work.”
— The truth is not always liked by those who try to avoid it, — I answered with a quote from Dovlatov.
— And why are you sure that I won’t become deputy minister?..
— Okay, let me tell you a joke.
“A boy is talking to his grandfather, a general:
— Grandpa, will I be a captain when I grow up?”
— Yes, grandson, you will be.
— And a colonel?
— Well, serve a little, graduate from the military academy, and we’ll make you a colonel.
— Grandpa, will I be a general?
— Well, you’ll be a general too.
— And a marshal?
— No, you won’t be a marshal. The marshal has his own grandson…”
“Oh, come on,” Pekar waved his hands. “Maybe I’ll even go into politics…
” “There! Exactly, go. Russia has Zhirinovsky, and we’re the one who’s missing. Why are you even picking on me? Either don’t write a book, or bring you a phone… I’m sitting here quietly, not bothering anyone, helping the zone – I did repairs in the detachment at my own expense, bought a mixing console for the musicians in the club, I edit films for you every now and then, I help the church… You have enough “targets” in the camp – the very last one calls the producer… So you’re hammering them.
” “You don’t need to help the zone in any way – you came here to sit. He bought the mixing console…
” “In Belarus, they’re used to doing nothing and getting paid for it. Lukashenko has spoiled you.
” “Okay, bring your phone.
” “What phone, Viktorovich?!” (In the zone, we usually call the cops by their patronymic.) I don’t have any phone.
- And they told me that there is... Or do you doubt it? - The baker openly admired himself.
- I have no doubts about your abilities, Viktorovich, - I warmed up his vanity, - you have already entangled the entire zone with an agent network...
- I can’t not react. Otherwise they will go higher, to my superiors, and say that I am “protecting” you. And I will even search my own brother if I find out that he is bringing “a pipe” into the zone...
I didn't tell him that since he was so honest, he shouldn't take tea, coffee, chocolate from the prisoners or smoke our cigarettes. Because, firstly, he wouldn't have understood anyway. And secondly, being in the zone, you'll have to find a compromise with the cops in any case: today you gave him a pack of cigarettes and a chocolate bar, and tomorrow you took something "not allowed" from the "regime". Pekar was right about one thing: the prisoners in the strict regime "sell out" left and right. There is no unity among our prisoners. Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Armenians and other national minorities, being in difficult circumstances, try to help their fellow countrymen in everything - that's what makes them strong. But for some reason, the Belarusians in the zone are most envious: the fact that I don't have a cow is, of course, bad, but it's much worse that my neighbor does. So we have to hide everything from prying eyes.
Solzhenitsyn wrote that in Stalin's camps the prisoners were guided by the principle "You die today, and I'll die tomorrow." For us, it's "Let them flog you today for a 'ban', and let them flog me tomorrow." And we don't understand that the price for this is already inevitable, that it may already be waiting for you outside the barracks, that any of our actions, be it good or evil, will boomerang back on us.
"I can't do it any other way, that's how my dad raised me," Pekar continued.
"Go to hell!" I thought to myself and took my leave. And although no one turned me in (only three people knew about this phone number, and they all called on it), bad feelings have not left me since then...

Chapter 61
A Good Cop Is a Dead Cop
- Zaborshchikov, Who's on Watch tonight? — I asked the guy who gave the signal to the whole squad when the cops approached the barracks.
— Kamenok is a loser, who got a piece of junk on the Shanghai for not paying off his gambling debt.
— Oh, that one... Lyokha, swap with him, let him stand there during the day. Not only does he not see anything, but he can also leave the lookout for a couple of minutes — to make himself some tea, for example...
— Okay, we'll swap starting on Monday. Otherwise, there'll be a mess with our pay.
Closer to lights out, the controllers arrived — soldiers from the internal troops, called in to guard us. They often come to see us. They drink our tea, eat our candies and smoke our cigarettes. In return, they feed us simple stories about their lives. The controllers are generally very similar to us: they speak the same gangster language, listen to Krug and Nagano and also don't want to work. Almost any guard deserves to go to prison, and almost any prisoner is fit to be a guard.
An hour later, the controllers left. I climbed into my "stash", took out my phone and separately put an extra battery on charge. Suddenly, there were calls again: the same "office" again. I hid the phone, screwed the cover of the "stash" back in place, lit a cigarette and assumed a casual look. I just didn't have time to throw the screwdriver away from the window.
The cops came into the section, I offered them tea again. They refused and just sat silently at the table, exchanging glances with each other. Not understanding what was going on, I looked at Makar, my section neighbor, a twenty-three-year-old village guy who sold a bag of wild hemp grown right in his garden to a buyer who turned out to be a cop, for which he got eight years - in his gaze I could read the same bewilderment and incomprehension of what was happening.
- Do you live in this section? - the controller Kostya, who looked like an Armenian, asked Makar.
I realized that a "seizure" was about to happen, tore off the battery with the charger and opened the door, getting ready to run out of the room.
- Bend over, - Kostya whispered to me, as if I was going to say something in your ear.
I bent down to him, and then the rusher rang five times - such a long signal was given only when the head of the colony, Pekar, or the "shmon brigade" was approaching the barracks.
— Damn it, don’t leave the section, they’re going to ‘take’ you now, — Kostya squealed.
And then I hesitated. Something suddenly clicked in my brain, and I started rushing around the room. That’s how Pekar and the head of the ‘regime’ Yasher ‘received’ me — with a battery in his hand.
They found a screwdriver. Twenty minutes later they figured out which lock the key fits, pulled back the curtains and took my phone out of the window frame. ‘Well, that’s it, my Nokia is done for,’ I thought with annoyance, looking at the n97 for the last time. — It was too good to last long.
— Get ready, Sergey, — Fedonenkov told me. — Your book won’t be complete without a description of the ‘kichi’…
I dressed warmly: thermal underwear, two warm socks, a robe, a scarf, a hat, a quilted jacket, gloves — and in the company of two regime officers I headed to the ‘sedimentary’.
— Oh, hi. What have you done? — Major Svistunov, the duty assistant to the head of the colony, was surprised.
— You don’t say anything, Vladimirovich.
— Are you going to write an explanation? — the DPNK asked.
— What kind of explanation? I don’t even know what wording was used to “lock me up”...
Officially, there are no and cannot be any mobile phones in the zone, so the following are often cited as violations: “failed to follow the “lights out” command,” “violation of dress code,” “use of homemade electrical appliances,” and so on.
— So-so… — Svistunov reached into his papers, — “failed to follow the “lights out” command and waved his arms,” he read in the violation report. — Well, write it down: failed to follow the “lights out” command because he didn’t want to sleep.
— Vladimirovich, this is insanity...
I refused to write an explanation and went into the "sedimentation area" — a small room with a concrete bench and a missing window, just like two years ago, when I first entered the zone. I spread my quilted jacket on the bench, inhaled the frosty air, which immediately made my nose sting, and finally relaxed. Along with the steam I exhaled, the nervous trembling that had been with me since the moment Pekar crossed the threshold of my section went away.
The rusty steel door clicked: Igor, the most humane controller in the zone, was standing on the threshold:
- Here, Gray, take these, - he handed me a few quilted jackets. - You'll freeze to death here overnight - it's minus twenty-four outside...
Life is a strange thing. For some cops, all these searches and raids are nothing more than work that they don't want to go to, but have to, for others it's a game of "cops and robbers" - apparently they didn't play enough as children. For the prisoners, everything is much more serious: some of us will lose parole because of the phone, some won't be able to come for a "visit", and others will have to be released "on call" altogether. And all because we want to communicate with our families not twice a month, as the administration allows us, but as often as we want. In the end, we were only deprived of our freedom...
In the morning, the DPNK took me to the "master".
- What do you say? — the chief's gaze, directed at me, was deliberately stern. — Where did you get the phone?
— I don't want to lie. I won't tell the truth either, — I answered with a pre-prepared phrase.
— You had a really cool phone — I don't have one like that on the outside. You don't get that kind of "planted information". That means someone brought it to you. I'm interested in traitors in my team. I'm declaring ten days of solitary confinement for you. For starters... Then six months in the BUR (high-security barracks), then to the "closed" one. So go and think. If you decide to talk, make an appointment, I'll call you...
In European countries, the chief of a prison is called the director. With us, as in the days of the GULAG, it's still the same "citizen chief". The "master" here is both the king and God. He has no less power than the president, only on a smaller scale. He executes if he wants, and pardons if he wants. In the zone, you don’t belong to yourself, which is why your life can change in an instant. Everyone in our camp is afraid of Colonel Shulgin: both the prisoners and his subordinates. That’s why when you hear “Ten — BUR — ‘covered’” addressed to you, it doesn’t seem like an empty threat.
Until recently, you could be put in solitary confinement for fifteen days. Now, the maximum is ten. However, as the cops themselves say: “It makes no difference to us whether we give you two fifteens or three tens.” It may make no difference to them, but for us prisoners, instead of two violations, we’ll have to get three.
“Let’s go chat,” Pekar’s tousled head appeared in the doorway of the “sedimentation area.”
“As you say, ‘chief,’” I agreed, and we went up to the security section building.
“Here, take it,” Pekar handed me a mug of tea when we sat down in the chairs. “I brewed it especially for you. With sugar.
I sipped it with pleasure. After twenty-four degrees of frost, the tea warmed me up no worse than French cognac.
“So, what’s the blocking code on your pipe?” Fedonenkov began.
“Are you kidding me?
” “I don’t get it…” The baker moaned in surprise.
— I once gave away my computer passwords — got ten years in prison. So let's not...
There was nothing illegal or criminal in the memory of my Nokia, but I didn't want anyone to read my "raw" materials for the book or look at my personal photos.
— What do I have to do with it? — The baker for some reason unbuttoned his shirt collar and stood up from the table. — Just because one of the cops once cheated you doesn't mean that they're all like that...
— Yeah, bad cops get bad coffins, good ones get good ones... — I remembered an old joke. — You're all tarred with the same brush.
— I can see we're not going to have a conversation.
— Viktorovich, you're a real Nostradamus...
After lunch, the senior shift controller came and they took me under "protection". It turned out that I spent more than fifteen hours in the cold "sedimentation tank". What finally finished me off was that the sentence only starts counting from the moment you were taken to the punishment cell...

Chapter 62
The Chamber of Exhaustion of the Human Body
The punishment cell (SHIZO), or "kicha", is the internal prison of the colony, something like a punishment cell in a pre-trial detention center. Those who violate the detention regime sit here, as well as those who have been sentenced to transfer to the PKT (a cell-type room, previously called the BUR). You sit here under lock and key, in cells similar to prison cells. What do you get sent to SHIZO for? For whatever you want: you displeased the boss, got up at the wrong time, went to bed at the wrong time, were late for a check, were dressed incorrectly, were in the wrong unit, smoked in the wrong place - here you go, three, five days. Ten days (maximum) are given for refusing to work or using prohibited items (mobile communications), as well as for drugs or drinking. And although the law says you can't go more than ten days, this accordion stretches out to six months.
BUR is a longer term. You're put there for a month, three months, six months - simply because the prisoner is considered dangerous. If you commit a violation while in BUR, you're transferred to "kicha", and these penalty days don't count towards your BUR term.
First of all, as in any prison, they take the laces out of your shoes and your watch off your wrist. Then they change you into knee-length pants that are worn to the point of holes and the same washed-out camisole with the inscription "SHIZO". The only personal belongings you can take into your cell are socks, underwear, long johns, soap, toothpaste and toothbrush, toilet paper and a towel.
- Well, Hacker, which cell are you going to? — Seeing that I had stopped in indecision, the controller on duty under the "roof" nicknamed Tyamtik asked me.
— I'll go talk to "the eighth" first.
The thieves who regulate all traffic under the "roof" usually sit in hut No. 8: they know who is sitting in which hut (for this they have a "computer" - a piece of cardboard on which they mark the names of those who have arrived and the numbers of the huts).
— Who, where from, for what? — asked a hoarse voice behind the door.
— Hacker, squad seven, for the "pipe".
— Where are you going?
— To the fourth… (I knew that this hut had two heating batteries, which, given the freezing temperatures outside, took on a sacred meaning).
— What’s there?
— There’s a reason.
— What’s the reason?
— Guys, I’m not going to shout across the entire corridor…
— Okay, go…
Cell No. 4 was in many ways reminiscent of the special corridor at Volodarka. Two by four meters, the same concrete “fur coat” on the walls, two fifteen-watt light bulbs covered with iron bars, a window closed with metal shutters, a washbasin, a “long-term storage” in the corner, a hanging cabinet for personal belongings, bunks that folded down at night and were designed for four people, several low metal stools built into the concrete floor, and a narrow table. Rusks were laid out on the radiator. “So that’s what the expression ‘to dry rusks’ means,” I immediately remembered.
“I thought I had hit rock bottom,” I said instead of greeting, looking around the cramped cell, “when suddenly someone knocked from below…
When you fly in from the Maldives and after a couple of days end up in a prison ‘septic tank’ with bedbugs and rats, it seems like this is the very bottom of life. It turns out that things can always be even worse. That’s why when people I know in the camp complain and say that everything is bad, I answer: “Don’t anger fate. Instead, remember those guys who are serving life sentences.” We only find out what “bad” is when it happens.
“Hi, come in. What unit are you from?” they invited me into the darkness of the hut.
“From the seventh…”
I sat down on the bunk and began to examine my comrades in misfortune – five guys covered in days-old stubble.
“For the phone?” a big guy asked me, whose face seemed familiar to me.
“Yes,” I sighed.
— Us too, — the big guy smiled. — 50% of the people in the "kiche" are for the "pipes". Komar, — he introduced himself.
In the corner of the cell, under the sink, a "snake" — a spiral of nichrome wire connected to the electrical wiring — glowed with a pleasant warmth.
— Before they drove it in, — Komar intercepted the direction of my gaze, — we didn't sleep for three nights, it was so cold in the cell that the snot froze in our noses. By the way, how much is it outside?
— Up to minus thirty at night, — I "delighted" my cellmates. — How can I write to the "residential"? March 8th is coming up — I need to tell my girls to congratulate me. This is my first time in the isolation ward...
— You don't have to write, — said some guy, — your unit is just a stone's throw away, it's better to shout "on the loudspeaker."
— How many people is the cell designed for?
— For four...
— I'm the sixth. How are we going to sleep? There's hardly room for us all on these bunks.
- On the floor.
- The floor is concrete... - I shrank from the anticipation of the inevitable acquaintance with the cold floor.
- Well, sorry, it's not a resort, - one of the guys spread his hands.
— And there’s no air at all, — I looked at the tightly closed window.
— It’s cold — we open it for ten minutes a day.
— And what about walks?
— You’re daydreaming. By the way, did you bring cigarettes?
— No. They didn’t “lock me up” from the unit, they took me straight to the “sedimentation cell”.
I didn’t have time to get ready. And I don’t smoke, I quit.
Smoking is not a habit, but a slave addiction, and it manifests itself most strongly in the punishment cell. In search of tobacco residue, cigarette butts are gutted, pockets are turned inside out, insoles are cut (into which tea and tobacco are often sewn) and shoes are shaken out. Cigarettes are rolled into thin strips with an aluminum mug and hidden wherever possible. Or they are packed in foil, sealed in several layers of cellophane and brought under the roof in their own ass. They call it “torpedoes”.
According to Solzhenitsyn, the punishment cell should be: a) cold, b) damp, c) dark, d) hungry. That's true for the first three, but what was a revelation for me was that they feed much better in the punishment cell than in the living area: the portions are twice as big and I finally saw meat in the rations. True, tea and jelly are poured into one bowl for everyone - there are no mugs.
- Gray, do you want some chaff? - asked the hundred-kilogram Komar, whose face clearly showed the desire to eat my portion as well.
- And you, cops, eat the chaff yourselves... - I answered in a singsong voice with a line from Krug's song.
- I'm serious.
- No, I won't.
Of course, I tried the chaff. On principle, I didn't eat it in the detention cell, but I tried it in the "kiche". So that, so to speak, I could experience all the hardships of prison life. Rarely disgusting, I tell you. Mishka Krug was right.
The light is always on in the isolation cell, the windows are closed and there is no clock, so you simply do not notice the change of day and night. At night we try to sleep on hard wooden bunks (cramped, but not offended), and during the day we have to sleep on the floor. Unaccustomed to it, our sides hurt terribly. The average daily temperature is no higher than plus ten, and this is taking into account our "horror". The cold constantly makes you sleepy. Time drags on as slowly as vodka when you just took it out of the freezer and pour it into shot glasses. There is absolutely nothing to do: you eat and sleep.
"Hey, Pasha," I called over to a familiar controller who was on duty in the punishment cell that night. "Give me a pen and paper."
After that, I started writing a book again. On scraps of wrapping paper (they don't give out any other kind there), in the flickering light of a fifteen-watt bulb... During the day I did push-ups and squats, washed my clothes in the sink, and at night I wrote.
I celebrated my twenty-eighth birthday right here, in the punishment cell. They brought tea, cigarettes, and chocolate from the zone. I really wanted coffee, but I had to be happy with what I had.
In "kiche", as in any cell system, good company is very important. In my opinion, the most progressive part of the convicts sits here - almost half are placed in solitary confinement for using mobile communications. Here, even in their sleep, they think about the Internet:
- Mm-m, how did you say you installed Opera Mini?
- What did I say?
- Or did I see it in a dream?
- Sleep, you dreamed it.
In 2010, the Criminal Executive Code allowed us to make calls without restrictions, but in our zone everything remained the same: twice a month for fifteen minutes. You sign an application for a call, stand in line for two hours, finally get to a payphone, and the neighbors are yelling as if they saw a phone for the first time in their lives:
- Manya, Manya! Don't forget to put lard in the parcel...
Our laws themselves give birth to crimes. Well, put a payphone in every "local area" - the number of violations in the zone will immediately decrease threefold. In Belarus, the state itself breeds criminals. You get drunk, punch your neighbor in the face - he writes a statement to the police. In the morning, both sober up, the neighbor's hurt and pain have passed, he goes to the cops to take the statement back - but no, it's too late, the fact of the crime has been recorded. That's why every fourth resident of our country has either been in prison himself or has relatives with criminal convictions.
On the last of your allotted days in the isolation ward, you only wonder about one thing: will you be released tomorrow or not. "Depe" - an additional ten days in the punishment cell - can be obtained in three ways: you are taken to the "boss", he comes to the punishment cell himself, or, what happens most often, the detachment officers come under your "roof" and from all sides you hear: "Budai - the boss has given you ten days, Shevelev - ten "depe" for you, Pavlovich - another "ten" from the boss ..."
- For what, Mikhalych?
- "I was sleeping, lying on the floor," he will read out the report on the violation.
- But I was not sleeping! — you will be indignant.
— Well, you understand...
You can not sleep during the day (although the cells are usually overcrowded), wear strictly according to the dress code, do a perfect cleaning of the cell on the day when you are appointed on duty, but if the authorities say "sic 'em", there will always be a violation for you. If only there was a person...
My second "ten" came to an end of the day unnoticed. I sent the text of the complaint to the "residential", and in case of the third "depe" I was going to declare a hunger strike. Some of the cellmates smoked fluoroplastic - some special plastic, after inhaling the vapors of which the body temperature rises sharply - and were going to go to the medical unit, but I refused such experiments.
— Yeah, guys, it's all sad... — I stated gloomily. — It's the 21st century, and here we have dampness, lack of light, a "fur coat" on the walls, drops of water collecting on the ceiling... We sleep on the cold floor, seal the cracks in the windows with toilet paper, hide pen refills in toothpaste, smoke cigarettes that we brought here in our own asses, eat with broken aluminum spoons from the same bowls...
— And before, it was: a "flying" day - a "non-flying" day.
— ?..
— It was all called KICHO — a chamber for the exhaustion of the human body. One day they fed, one day they didn't.
— Hmm...

Chapter 63
That's good!
Of course, they didn't take me away to the "covered" one. And they didn't even "drill" me. My mother came to Shulgin, promised that I would behave well (our parents want to believe until the very end that we are good and obedient), and I was released from the punishment cell.
You leave the “roof” and rejoice in everything in the world: the wet snow in your face is nothing to you, and the piercing wind is blowing towards you. The camp brings you back down to earth. Only here do you begin to rejoice in simple things: walking barefoot on the grass damp with morning dew, listening to the birds singing, sunbathing, eating a ripe, juicy tomato from your own garden, drinking bread kvass from a barrel... In freedom, all this is familiar and you don’t even think about such trifles.
In the detachment, my comrades in captivity are: Vova Kapustin, Kolobok, Makar, Murashka. A quick holiday table and conversations, conversations...
- Yesterday we knew that you would be released. But we decided to make it a surprise, - Sasha Kolobok, one of the members of Morozov's Gomel gang, patted me on the shoulder.
- Everything is okay, I am very glad to see you all.
- Well, have you had a smoke in the "kiche"? - Makar asked me.
- No, Max, I haven't. As one of the classics said, the more habits, the less freedom. How are things with you here?
- Everything is fine - thanks to exercise, - Kolobok responded cheerfully.
- And what, are the searches at night still going on? - I asked.
- The idea of night searches was suggested to political officer Khrol by the same Pekar. There were four of them, including yours. And then in the thirteenth detachment, the prisoners turned off the lights, and several controllers remained in the barracks. And they could have been stabbed in the dark. So night searches are, of course, good, but only until something happens to the employees. And if they do, everyone will get it in the pants - that's already a disaster.
Early in the morning, the squad leader woke me up:
- Seryozha, bad news. The boss told me to write a report for your transfer to the third squad. With an assignment to the industrial zone - so that, as he put it, "you don't go crazy from phones."
- Apparently, he didn't like the way I wrote about the zone... Okay, what other reason could there be?
- The same old thing: he wants to know how phones get into the zone. More precisely, who exactly brings them.
- Half the zone carries them, Mikhalych!..
— In short, he said to talk to you, and if not, to transfer you to another unit and to the "industrial camp"...
— Yeah, as a slave...
— Well, tell me his last name! — the unit member started shouting. — But that's a specific prohibition — a telephone!.. I don't carry telephones... The
unit leader is like a soldier in the army, the main "combat" unit in the camp. It is he we deal with every day. He will listen, give advice, help, take your application to the head of the colony for signature. True, the authorities in our zone do not consider the unit members to be people, but that's a completely different story...
— Why do you need these inconveniences? — he continued. — One move is worse than two fires...
— Mikhalych, I will not give up the "road". Firstly, the man has a family, children, and he will be fired under the article. Where will he look for work on your "collective farm"? A railway depot, a flax mill and two zones... Today I'll hand it over - tomorrow you... How do you like this arrangement? That's why I won't say anything to you or the "owner".
- I understand you on a human level. You have to fight cell phones in the zone with technical means - install all sorts of "jammers" - and not breed bitches. When I worked in the police, even though it was the police, I tried to do everything honestly...
- Well, what can I say? This is good...
- What is good? - Drugakov stared at me in confusion.
- Everything is good. Everything that happens is for the best. Listen to a parable.
And I told him one of my favorite stories.
"One African king had a close friend with whom he grew up. This friend, considering any situation that ever happened in his life, be it positive or negative, had a habit of saying: "This is good!"
One day the king was hunting. His friend was loading a gun for him. Apparently he had done something wrong while preparing one of the guns. When the king fired, his thumb was torn off. As his friend examined the situation, he said, as usual, “That’s good.” “No, that’s not good!” the king became angry and ordered his friend to be sent to prison.
About a year passed. During one of his hunts, the king was captured by cannibals. They brought him to their village, tied him to a pole and carried a pile of wood. When they came closer to make a fire, they noticed that the king was missing a finger on his hand. And because of their superstition, cannibals never ate anyone who was physically disabled. They untied the king and let him go.
Returning home, the king remembered the incident when he lost his finger and ordered his friend to be released at once.
“You were right,” he said, “it was good that I lost my finger.
” And the king told everything that had just happened to him.
"I'm sorry I put you in prison, it was bad of me," he said.
"No," his friend replied, "it was good."
— What are you saying?! Is it good that I put my friend in prison for a whole year?!
— If I weren’t in prison, I’d be there with you…”
— So it’s all nonsense, Mikhalych. We’ll survive. What kind of “industrial complex” is this in the third detachment?
— The devil knows… Production of metal canisters, or something like that, or stamping…
Epilogue
2012. Our mothers and wives, who come to visit us, are still being frisked and stripped naked. Prisoners, like thirty years ago, are forcing Vaseline into their fists. Nothing has changed in the carding sphere either. Some “topics” have faded away, others have appeared. The old carding forums have closed — in their place, like mushrooms after the rain, new ones have sprung up, and you can only get to them by invitation. Their owners assure us that this will protect us from the presence of the police. As always, they are wrong.
In May 2010, Fidel was arrested. Three months later, BadB. The Americans managed to detain all of Gonzalez's "friends" except my brother.
JonnyHell is still awaiting trial. Boa has been waiting for this for... nine years.
Gonzalez tried to soften his fate by saying that he suffers from Asperger's syndrome and Internet addiction, but it did him little good. Despite the fact that most countries in the world have already completely switched to more secure chip bank cards (compromising the dump or even the PIN code of which will give nothing to the attacker, since the smart card itself is needed to perform the transaction, which in most cases the carder does not have), America and Russia still use outdated cards with a magnetic strip, which make it possible to commit thefts. American banks and credit companies have abandoned chip cards because the cost of replacing POS terminals and ATMs across the country significantly exceeds their annual losses from fraud. Russia has more important problems. Therefore, dumps are still being sold.
In the fight against cybercrime, little has changed in the last four years. Even when the victim company has specific leads, the case rarely leads to punishment. Very often the question is posed as follows: is it reasonable to spend $10-15 thousand to investigate the theft of $1 thousand, especially since banks often compensate victims for their losses. And the fact of leaking personal information of clients has a very strong impact on the company's reputation (in the ten weeks after TJX made an announcement about the intrusion of Albert Gonzalez, its shareholders lost more than $1 billion). For these reasons, many organizations prefer to remain silent about incidents of data theft.
All this allows us to confidently state that the secret services will never be able to put an end to cybercrime, just as they cannot completely defeat crime in the real world ...
Afterword
Unfortunately, our life is written without drafts. It cannot be edited by crossing out individual lines. A year after our marriage, Katerina filed for divorce. She was tired of seeing me as a prisoner of other people's rules... Do I regret that our paths diverged? Yes, madly. Those were the best days of my life.
In the courtroom they always ask: "Do you admit your guilt? Do you repent?" - and in order to get a shorter sentence, you have to agree with everything. But is this repentance?! Only after serving four years and having reviewed my life quite a bit, I understood why I had suffered everything: both prison and the torment of my relationship with Katya. "Just as a launched boomerang always returns to its original place," investigator Makarevich once told me, "so the commission of a crime predetermines the inevitability of punishment. The main reason for all crimes in the world, and especially cybercrimes, is the illusory hope of impunity. You can steal for a year, two, five - and never get caught, but then you will definitely go to jail. Because the sentence is not necessarily passed by the courts, - at this he looked up meaningfully, - the laws of life have a secret need for balance ... " I do not know who or what Makarevich believes in, but he turned out to be right. I myself have recently grown to a similar thought. No punishment in this earthly life comes to us undeservedly. Moreover, it may come for something that we are not really guilty of. But if you go through your life, think deeply - we will always find that crime of ours for which we have now been struck. And here you can no longer hide behind an anonymous proxy and VPN. Any of our actions, good or bad, boomerangs back to us. This has always been the case throughout the world. And this is how it will be.
In the second part of The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has one significant episode. During a trip in a special convoy, the author plunges into the thick of freedom for a while, ends up at a train station, looks through announcements that certainly cannot concern him in any way, and hears “strange, insignificant conversations”: about a husband beating his wife or leaving her, and a mother-in-law for some reason does not get along with her daughter-in-law, and communal neighbors burning the electricity in the corridor and not wiping their feet, and someone bothering someone else at work, and someone being invited to a good place, but he does not dare to move… “You listen to all this,” he writes, “and goosebumps of renunciation suddenly run down your back and head: the true measure of things in the Universe appears so clearly to you! The measure of all weaknesses and passions! - and these sinners are not given to see it. How can you instill it in them - with insight? with a vision? In a dream - brothers! People! Why have you been given life?! In the dead of night the doors of death chambers are thrown open - and people with great souls are dragged to be shot. On all the railways of the country at this very moment, now people are licking their dry lips with bitter tongues after herring, they are dreaming of the happiness of straightened legs, of peace after going to the toilet. In Orotukan only in the summer does the ground freeze a meter - and only then are the bones of those who died during the winter buried in it. And you - under the blue sky, under the hot sun have the right to dispose of your own destiny, to go for a drink of water, to stretch, to go anywhere without an escort - what unwiped feet, what does a mother-in-law have to do with it? The most important thing in life, all its mysteries - do you want me to pour it out for you now? Do not chase after the illusory - for property, for a title: this is earned with the nerves of decades, and confiscated in one night. Live with equal superiority over life - do not be afraid of trouble and do not pine for happiness, all the same: bitter will not last forever, and sweet will not be in abundance. It is enough for you if you do not freeze and if thirst and hunger do not tear your insides with their claws. If your back is not broken, both legs walk, both arms bend, both eyes see and both ears hear - who else should you envy? Why? Envy of others eats us up more than anything. Wipe your eyes, wash your heart - and value those who love you and who are disposed towards you above all else. Don't offend them, don't scold them, don't part with any of them in a quarrel: after all, you don't know, maybe this is your last act before your arrest, and that's how you will remain in their memory!.. "
And we are all chasing "Bentleys" and millions... To see your child grow up - that's what is truly important! It took me seven years of prisons and camps to understand this simple truth.
I devoted ten years of my life to carding. When I got out of prison for the first time, not only did I not "tie it up", but I also started sending spam. Now I am trying myself in writing. What I will do tomorrow is unknown. No one knows anything in advance. I am sure of only one thing: neither the court, nor the harshest sentence, nor the prison administration will be able to change my views, unless I myself want to change.
I have already drawn some conclusions. And I have yet to reach some. That is why I am still sitting in prison. And I still cannot get used to it... Our section is very smoky and the smell of fried potatoes (which, thank God, is still sold in the zone) has not completely disappeared. The thermometer outside shows minus two, but the batteries have already been turned off (in Belarus, there is a total economy mode). Butyrka is playing on the radio, designed for morons, for the hundredth, no, thousandth time. I jump onto my "palm tree", take out a notebook and finish writing the last lines of this book. Everything written in it is true. And all of this will stay with me forever. It is snowing outside. Probably the last one this year. I cover myself with a quilted jacket, close my eyes and press "play".
Oh, what white snow, oh, what white snow outside the window!
How many towers are there in this damned kingdom of snow?
The chilly camp, hunched up, seemed to have fallen into a white sleep,
And as if it were spinning in a closed glass circle.
And if such luck should suddenly fall to me
And my friends would say: "Yes, he's already been released," -
I'll go south, of course I'll go south,
I was once in the south, I was born in the south, -
Shufutinsky sings in the headphones of my iPod, -
I'll get off at the platform, forgotten by its town,
I'll take off my hat, take off my crumpled hat,
Say hello to someone, to someone I don't know, With whom
I've never walked, with whom I've never walked in a prison camp.
I want to hold simple grapes in my palms,
I want to caress my old mother on her chest.
I'll be so happy there, I'll be happy with everything, very happy
And I won't draw either the ace or the queen of spades.
And the stages go to the east, all go to the east,
And one after another, all similar faces flash by,
From the country of camps the mainland is so far, so far,
And the Sea of Okhotsk smokes with a leaden fog.
I do not know why I fell in love with Magadan forever
And in Nagaevskaya Bay the barges rubbed by ice floes.
So why do I sometimes get a suitcase from under the bunks?
I have become fussy before my time and, probably, older.
I do not want to talk to anyone about anything in the barracks,
With the years we become extremely silent here.
But at night I get up and go for a smoke more and more often,
And with my back I acutely feel the pain of someone's inquisitive glances.
And I cannot hide from myself, and cannot hide this sticky fear,
That forever we are all tied in a white devil's circle ...
But I need to go south, I need it so much, I need it so much to go south,
I want to die, I want to die only in the south.
Oh, what white snow, oh, what white snow outside the window,
Oh, what white snow…
Penal Colony No. 8, Orsha, March 2012.
Expression of gratitude
It took me more than three years to write this book. My mother, as well as my friends Sasha Soroka, Valentin Syulzhin and Tanya Anyukova supported me all this time. I am infinitely grateful to all of them and would like to express special gratitude to my mother-in-law Lyudmila Kazakevich for her letters that supported me in prison and in the zone, to my brother Dmitry for his invisible approval of all my endeavors and to my best friend Nikolai - no one has done more for me than he has.
I would like to thank Alexey Kuzmenkov (mastak.by) for his work on the book's design, artist Andrey Dubnikov (dubnikov.com) for his sketches from the courtroom, my university friend Vadim Shmygov, who helped me collect material for the book and charged me with optimism, Sergey Zhukov, Boa, Bigbaer, as well as the portals securitylab.ru and pritchi.ru.
I would like to thank the staff of the Russian version of Forbes magazine for the inspiration and ideas that I have often drawn from their materials, wired.com columnist Kim Zetter, BelGazeta correspondent Elena Ankudo, the author of the excellent book Kingpin Kevin Paulsen and the American writer Robert Greene, whose books The 48 Laws of Power and 33 Strategies of War helped me believe in myself.
I would like to thank Vova Maglysh, Sergey Bagaudinov, Igor Barabanov, Artur Kovalevsky, Igor Barkun, Pasha Gorbatovsky, Vitaly Varlamov, Stepan Shevelev and Vova Kapustin - my comrades in captivity and tireless listeners, as well as all those who read the book, in whole or in part, and made their suggestions.
I am extremely grateful to Olga Semernaya, who typeset the entire text of the book, as well as to my friends Maxim Kostyushko and Katya Kibalchich - they "cleaned" my manuscript of everything boring and unnecessary as best they could, but at the same time tried to ensure that the book remained written by me, and not by them.
I am also grateful to my web designer Maksimator, my colleagues eNdi, Astal, Liratto and Black Monarch, lawyer Marina Vorobyova and all those caring and responsive people who, risking their careers, helped me work on the book and whose names I cannot yet voice.
I am very grateful to Dmitry Belikov and the entire team of the publishing house "Piter" for the fact that my book was published so quickly.
I am grateful to God that I was able to successfully complete this work, and finally, I want to thank all those who believed in me and supported me all this time - without you, nothing would have happened!
Characters mentioned in the book
Roman Stepanenko (Vega) — in 2003, together with Liratto, he was arrested in Cyprus and extradited to the USA. Currently, he is in the New York Metropolitan Detention Center. The investigation has been going on for nine years, there has been no trial yet. Many believe that this is impossible in America, but it turns out that it is very possible. During his time in prison, he has greatly improved his English, and has been studying Japanese for five years. He is surrounded by stacks of books and magazines, maintains an extensive correspondence, and has achieved success in yoga. He is in a cheerful mood, and does not give up.
Artur Lyashenko (BigBuyer) — one of the CarderPlanet dons, the creator and ideological inspirer of the counterfeit plastic card manufacturing company realplastic.org, was sentenced to six years in prison and a fine in June 2006. He was released in 2007.
Alexey Stroganov (Flint24) — moderator of the carder.org forum and "head of the counterfeit plastic card production workshop" for realplastic.org, was sentenced to 6 years in prison in 2006. He was released "on a call" in 2008.
Gerasim Selivanov (Gabrik) — one of the participants in the realplastic.org syndicate, was accused of supplying dumps to almost all manufacturers of counterfeit "plastic" in the former USSR. For a long time, he was on the list of "the most wanted criminals in Russia", posted on the FSB website (fsb.ru). In June 2006, he was sentenced to five and a half years in prison. He was released.
Boris Drankman (Nicron) — thanks to his determination, he avoided arrest in Belarus. He got married and is raising a child. Lives in Russia.
Michael Cheung Ho (Mondeo), the "foreman" of the Chinese triad, was arrested in Belgium in 2004. A year later, his wife Lam Tsz Kwan (Candy) was arrested. They each received six years in prison. They served two years and were deported home to Hong Kong - in Europe they understand that there is no need to keep foreign nationals in prison at the expense of their taxpayers.
Oleg Bunas (Olegas), the owner of the electronic currency exchanger webmoney.by, was sentenced in April 2005 to three years of restricted freedom ("chemistry") for engaging in illegal entrepreneurial activity (exchanging currencies without a license). That same year, a case was opened against him, his girlfriend Yulia Goryacheva and other webmoney.by employees on charges of creating fake online stores and "cardboard" as payment. Yulia Goryacheva is wanted by Interpol.
Aleksandr Zhdanov (Lesik) is a talented programmer and creator of four Internet pyramids. He was arrested in 2004 and sentenced to nine years in prison. He served his sentence in Correctional Colony No. 8 in Orsha. He was released in 2008.
Dmitry Golubov (Script) — was arrested in 2005 in Odessa on suspicion of creating the international hacker organization CarderPlanet, whose members illegally received at least $11.4 million from American bank accounts. He spent only six months in jail and was released on bail of 100 thousand hryvnia (about $20 thousand), which was posted by people's deputies Volodymyr Makeenko and Volodymyr Demekhin. During the court hearing, the criminal case fell apart — not least thanks to Script's money and the connections of the vice-president of the Union of Advocates of Ukraine Petro Boyko. After his release, he founded and registered the Internet Party of Ukraine. One of the priorities of its activities is the fight against crime. He claims that the idea of creating the party and even its name came to him in a dream. He is married and has a son. By 2018, he plans to become the Prime Minister of Ukraine.
Valid Agayev, one of the suspects in the murder of journalist Paul Klebnikov, was accused of organizing the kidnapping of Azerbaijani businessman Aliyev, was found guilty only of committing a crime under Article 222 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation ("illegal acquisition, transfer, sale, storage, transportation or carrying of a weapon") and sentenced to the maximum penalty of three years' imprisonment in a general regime colony. Released.
Kazbek Dukuzov (Cherny) was accused of murdering Paul Klebnikov. Together with other defendants in the case - Musa Vakhayev and Fail Sadretdinov - he was acquitted by a jury. Subsequently, the acquittal was overturned by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, and the case was sent for a new trial. The trial was suspended due to the disappearance of the main defendant Kazbek Dukuzov, who, according to investigators, shot at the journalist. The person who ordered the murder, according to the investigation, was former Chechen field commander Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, who was the main character in Khlebnikov's book "Conversation with a Barbarian."
Ilya Saprykin (Postal) — in 2007, he was found guilty of stealing $200,000 from Minsk ATMs and sentenced to six years in prison. He served his sentence as a dough mixer in the maintenance detachment of Minsk pretrial detention center #1 (Volodarka). In 2010, he was released under amnesty.
Artem Burak — in 2006, he was accused of providing his former classmate Ilya Saprykin with dumps of PIN codes and stealing about $200,000 with them. He admitted his guilt and cooperated with the investigation, so during the preliminary investigation and trial he was under a written undertaking not to leave the country. He did not appear for the verdict and was sentenced in absentia to six years of imprisonment. On the new charge, taking into account the previous term, he received six and a half years in a maximum security penal colony. He was released in the fall of 2012.
Vladimir Boyankov (Bayan) — was arrested in Minsk in 2007. He was accused of embezzling $340,000 together with Colonels Novik and Miklashevich from the K Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus. He was sentenced to seven years in prison with confiscation of property. Viktor Boyankov — Vladimir Boyankov’s twin brother — was sentenced to six years in prison in a maximum security penal colony. The sentence was overturned by the Supreme Court, and the case was sent for a new trial.
Sergei Novik — a police colonel, first deputy head of the K Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, was accused of abuse of office and the creation of an organized criminal group, which, in addition to him, included Colonel Miklashevich from the same department, a graduate of the Radio Engineering Institute Artem Burak, and the Boyankov twin brothers. According to the case materials, the criminal group created and led by Novik stole about $340,000 from ATMs using counterfeit plastic cards with PIN codes. Sentenced to eight years in prison.
Andrei Miklashevich, a police colonel and one of the deputy heads of Department "K" of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, was found guilty of abuse of office and sentenced to three years in prison with confiscation of property and a ban on holding positions in law enforcement agencies. Acquitted two years later.
Aleksandr Makarevich, a police major and investigator in the Department for Solving Crimes in the Sphere of High Technologies of the Main Internal Affairs Directorate of Minsk, received the position of deputy head of the investigative department of Department "K", from which he was "fired" immediately after the arrest of Novik and Miklashevich. Currently works in a commercial bank. Dreamed of rising to the rank of general.
Alexander Vovkulak is my "sworn friend". In 2004, during a "showdown" in Kiev, he killed one bandit with a knife and wounded another. He hid from the investigation and the gang in Moscow. He was killed there in 2008 with a blow "to the back of the head with a blunt object". Several months before that, unknown persons shot at his Mercedes, killing two passengers.
Maxim Yastremsky (Maksik), a dump seller and one of the key members of Albert Gonzalez's group, was found guilty of interfering with the computer systems of twelve Turkish banks and carrying out fraudulent transactions with the data obtained. He was sentenced in Turkey to thirty years in prison and a fine of $23,000. He tried to commit suicide twice.
Alexander Suvorov (JonnyHell, lifestyle, Dantist) was arrested in Germany on March 3, 2008 and extradited to the United States, where he, along with Yastremsky and Gonzalez, was charged with hacking into the computer network of Dave&Buster's restaurants, stealing more than 5,000 credit card numbers from there, and other crimes. The trial is ongoing.
Stephen Watt, a 25-year-old Morgan Stanley employee, was accused of creating a packet sniffer that a group of hackers led by Albert Gonzalez used to steal data from more than 100 million credit and debit cards. He was sentenced to two years in prison, followed by three years of probation and ordered to pay $171.5 million in restitution to TJX. He is serving his sentence at SeaTac Federal Prison in Seattle, USA.
Hamza Zaman, a 33-year-old Barclays Bank system administrator, was accused of providing a group of hackers led by Albert Gonzalez with unauthorized access to the Heartland Payment Systems processing center, as well as laundering $800,000 for Gonzalez. He was sentenced to 46 months in prison and a fine of $75,000. He cannot apply for parole earlier than three years from the date of imprisonment.
Jeremy Jethro, a 29-year-old computer security specialist from Boston, was accused of receiving $60,000 from Albert Gonzalez for a 0-day exploit for the Internet Explorer browser. The investigation and the court were unable to establish what role the exploit played in Gonzalez's crimes and whether it was used at all. Albert Gonzalez (soupnazi, segvec, j4guar17) was sentenced to three years of probation and a $10,000 fine.
He pleaded guilty to three criminal charges of stealing more than 200 million bank cards from the computer networks of TJX, Hannaford Brothers, Heartland Payment Systems and others. He made a plea deal, revealing the details of all his crimes, and agreed to give the government $1.6 million in cash, an apartment in Miami, a BMW, several Rolex watches and even a Tiffany diamond ring he gave his girlfriend. For this, federal prosecutors asked for a sentence of fifteen to twenty-five years in prison (otherwise, he faced life imprisonment). The lawyers insisted that their twenty-eight-year-old client suffers from autism and Internet addiction, committed all criminal acts under the influence of LSD, marijuana and ketamine and was not aware of what he was doing, however, given the scale of the scams launched by Gonzalez, it was hard to believe. "I understand that the road home will be long," Albert said before the verdict was announced.
The federal court sentenced him to twenty years in prison and a fine of $ 10 thousand.
Christopher Scott, Gonzalez's "right hand", received an income of over $ 400 thousand, which he spent on renting limousines, noisy parties, buying jewelry and a house for $ 400 thousand. He agreed to help in the investigation (otherwise he could spend the rest of his days in prison) and was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Damon Patrick Toey, Gonzalez's accomplice and the prosecution's key witness against him, was arrested in May 2008. He
"turned in" Gonzalez and thus helped solve "the most complex and largest identity theft in U.S. history." He could have been sentenced to twenty-two years in prison, but the prosecutor's office took into account his active cooperation with the investigation and requested only six years in prison and a fine of $100,000. The federal court in Boston sentenced Tui to five years in prison and three years of probation after release, as well as a fine of $100,000.
Max Vision (Max Ray Butler, Iceman, Generous, Digits, Aphex) is one of the most famous hackers of our time and the owner of the CardersMarket forum, was arrested in 2007 and three years later sentenced to thirteen years in prison for the theft of 1.8 million credit cards, 1.1 million of which were stolen by hacking POS terminals installed in American restaurants. The financial institutions lost $86.4 million. In light of Butler's guilty plea to all charges, as well as his "extensive and valuable assistance to the investigation" after his arrest, the prosecutor's office asked for him to be sentenced to thirteen years in prison (initially, he faced thirty years to life). In addition, he must pay the affected banks $27.5 million in compensation — their costs for reissuing 1.1 million stolen cards. Max can count on early release no earlier than eleven years after his imprisonment.
Vladislav Khorokhorin (Bad) B)is “one of the top five cybercriminals in the world” and was arrested in Nice on August 7, 2010 and extradited to the United States. He holds dual Ukrainian-Israeli citizenship. He is accused of fraud, illegal access to bank accounts and selling confidential information. Later, Khorokhorin’s participation in “the largest carding attack in history in terms of the number of participants, coordination and one-time damage” was added to the charges. On November 8, 2008, immediately after midnight (Eastern Time), an army of droppers armed with duplicate Royal Bank of Scotland “salary cards” simultaneously withdrew $9.5 million from more than two thousand ATMs in forty cities around the world. According to the investigation, Khorokhorin received $125,000 from ATMs in the Moscow region. If found guilty, he faces twelve years in prison and a fine of $500,000. He could receive the same punishment for participating in the scam with RBS.
Sergey Storchak (Fidel) — administrator of the carderportal.org forum, was detained on May 8, 2010 at the airport in New Delhi, India, and extradited to the United States. He is accused of selling dumps on a number of Internet forums, including my DumpsMarket. He agreed to cooperate with the investigation, so the sentence he faces is only about three years in prison.
Dmitry Burak (Leon, Graph, Wolf, Leo Kurochkin) — my brother, the most wanted person in the world, according to the US Secret Service.
Ryan Knisley (Sonelao, Surfrider, Mr.Towellie, Richard Druc) — from August 7, 2006 to the present — special agent of the US Secret Service. Hiding under the guise of a dump buyer, he gains the trust of carders, makes test purchases, which becomes the basis for subsequent accusations. Involved in the arrests of Maksik, JonnyHell, Fidel, BadB and me.
Katya Eliseeva — was my wife for some time.

(c) Sergei Aleksandrovich Pavlovich.
ISBN 978-5-496-00280-6