Jollier
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Operation Firewall is the largest carder bust in history. I'll tell you how it really happened. Let's talk about the closure of Shadowcrew and CarderPlanet. It will bring old school, I promise, enjoy reading!
And we are not carders, man, no, we are not carders. There on the planet we lost our ranks. People tend to make mistakes, in ordinary life the cost of a mistake is not great, but everything is different if you are a cybercriminal.
The slightest oversight and the feds are already knocking on your door. It happened in the South of Market area of San Francisco. There Chris and the girls checked into the posh W Hotel to go for a couple of runs around the local shopping centers. He was very surprised when the phone rang in his room, it was the front desk calling, his credit card was declined.
He took the elevator down to the hotel lobby, pulled a new card out of his wallet, and watched the administrator with a straight face as he swiped the cards through the terminal. The transaction was declined, the administrator said. Chris quickly pulled out a third card and thrust it into the hands of the young man, who seemed to be suspicious of something. Another refusal, and only with the fourth card did Chris finally manage to pay for the rooms, but while he was going back up in the elevator to his floor, the vigilant administrator was already dialing the bank number.
A couple of hours later, the San Francisco Police Department knocked on Chris's door. The cops handcuffed him without asking questions and searched his room and car. As a result, they confiscated his Sony laptop, MSR-206, and his car, an SUV with a changed VIN number.
It is not surprising that Chris ended up in the county jail; having paid for the rooms in cash, such a problem would never have happened. And so Max was beside himself with anger when he found out what had happened. And although Aragon quickly got out of this mess a month later, receiving a three-year suspended sentence, Butler decided that he could not rely solely on his accomplice, and he resorted to a backup plan. Max would learn the carding craft, and at the same time he needed to check Chris.
Lately, he had been paying poorly and complained that 100 credit cards were only about 50 valid, and only half of them could be used to buy something for subsequent sale, and cards with a protective limit of 500 bucks were only good for filling up a car or buying food. Chris also had expenses, the expanding business required his team to constantly fly to distant cities, and plane tickets were not getting cheaper.
In addition, he paid rent for an apartment at Villa Sieni, where he ran his credit card factory. But Butler did not particularly care about other people's difficulties, he finally began to enjoy life. Using forged documents, he rented a spacious penthouse in the Fillmore district. In these locations, Max and Charity lived, fucked, and programmed. Charity was coding something for her legal job, while Max continued to fleece the naive carders from Carder Planet and Shadow Crew, and also planned a new hack.
But first he needed to get his hands on an MCP-206 writer and he didn't want Chris to know about it. It didn't take long to find a reliable supplier of the equipment. People of Shadow Crew and the planet always knew that everything necessary for carding was available from a seller named UbuyWeRush. Butler made inquiries, it turned out that in one of the shopping centers of Los Angeles there was a retail store with a similar name.
Finding himself on its doorstep, Max was met by none other than the owner of the store, the legendary Caesar Carenza. At that time, carders from all over the world, vacationing in California, stopped just to see the famous You Buy We Rush warehouse with their own eyes and shake Caesar's hand. Caesar got into carding in the early 90s, in 98 he folded his rods to find himself in life. He graduated from Devry University in 2001 with a degree in computer programming, hoping to find a job on the Internet.
But not finding anything suitable for the position of a programmer, he decided to try himself as an independent businessman. From an advertisement in Delhi, Kamerson learned about an upcoming auction at a public storage facility in Long Beach, where owners were selling off the contents of their long-abandoned garages. They were locked, so only God knew what was in them. In America and Europe, such events have been held for a very long time.
The background of the things that ended up at the sale, as a rule, has one scenario. A person, in order not to clutter his apartment, rents a container and places all his junk in it. Then, for some reason, he stops or forgets to pay the rent and he is sent notifications about forgotten things. The person ignores the notifications and does not pay the rent, and then the company puts him in the garage with his things up for auction.
Having got to this auction, Caesar was pleasantly surprised. It turned out to be not just an auction, but some kind of peculiar ritual. The manager with a bolt cutter in his hands opened the locks one by one, and the buyers examined the contents of the garage, but only from where they stood, at a distance of six meters. In a fair fight, one of the participants in the auction, having offered a higher price, took all the contents of the storage.
The winner hung his lock and was obliged to clean out the container within 24 hours. And although Cesar was not prepared, like the other participants, he had more than enough desire to win. At the very first auction, he was the only one who agreed to give one tank for a closet with old clothes in an empty garage. It would seem one dollar for a closet with rags, and nevertheless, the enterprising Cesar sold all those clothes on Ebay for 60 bucks.
Corenzo was a born businessman, he could sell anything, even underwear with a cherkash, and you would buy the cherkash separately. He thought that he had found his little niche and began to regularly attend such auctions and liquidations of enterprises, where they sold everything they no longer needed for a pittance, taking large lots and selling everything on eBay. Caesar invested the money he earned in this way in his business and opened a store in a shopping center on Long Beach.
He received various goods, office furniture, sun loungers, jeans and again sold everything on the Internet. It was a good honest job, unlike carding. He was happy selling on eBay, but memories of the past one day painted a question in his head. Is there a store specializing in selling the equipment that he used as a fraudster?
Finding that there were none online, Cesar decided to give it a try, he bought a few MSR-206 from suppliers and put them up for sale on the YouBuyWeRush store on eBay. And imagine his surprise when all the equipment was bought up in a couple of days. Later, one of the buyers told Cesar about a website where he could sell even more goods and even faster. He introduced Cesar to the script, who personally gave the green light to his shop on the Planet carder, and so UbuyWeRush appeared on the planet.
In the welcome post, Cesar wrote "I decided to help you guys make big money. So if you need me, I sell card printers, embossers, hot stamping tips, miniature skimmers and much more. I know this sounds like an advertisement, but I do all this for you, my store is a safe place to shop.
Things took off quickly, Caesar created his own website, and began selling on Shadow Crew, and soon had about 800 regular customers. His reputation as a seller grew every day, and new customers came to him without fear to buy from him. With a customer in every time zone, he answered calls 24 hours a day, guaranteed same-day shipping, and had good relations with his competitors.
So if he ran out of an item, he could easily buy more from his comrades to fulfill his obligations and keep customers happy no matter what. Such strategic decisions soon turned Yubayu and Rush into the best supplier of equipment for the global community of carders and hackers. Selling equipment itself was not illegal, as long as you did not sell it for fraudulent purposes. Incidentally, Caesar also had legitimate customers who bought equipment to make corporate ID cards and school lunch vouchers.
Over time, the orders became so numerous that Caesar posted a job posting and began hiring employees to take inventory, pack, and ship the goods. When neighboring offices opened, he annexed them for additional storage space, first doubling, then tripling his space. Fascinated by the global reach of his marketplace, he hung a map on the wall and marked each city with a pin as he shipped an order.
Six months later, the map showed pins for states in Canada, Europe, Africa, and Asia. A dense metal forest had sprung up in southwestern Russia near the Black Sea and, of course, Ukraine. Max was briefly fascinated by the map, since his malware had a similar geography. He took the MSR-206 and left the store in a hurry.
Now Max could do more than Chris and her girls. He could insert the plastic into an ATM and take all the cash at once. That was the whole point of cashing out, to get money and not goods that were sold for only a fraction of their value. The thing was, Butler was involved in one of the biggest mistakes in banking history, which the lucky cardholders will never know.
A commercial bank in Kansas, Missouri, was probably the first to figure out what was going on. In 2003, a bank security specialist was surprised to notice that $10,000 to $20,000 a day was disappearing from customer accounts. Someone was withdrawing money from ATMs in Italy. He would come to the bank on Monday and see a terrible picture, his bank had lost about $70,000 over the weekend. During his personal investigation, he would discover that all the customers had fallen victim to a phishing attack aimed at collecting bank card numbers and PIN codes.
But something was wrong, in Part 5 I said that the CVV code was designed specifically for this case and was supposed to prevent such a scheme. Without this code programmed into the magnetic strip of plastic cards, the data collected by phishing should not work at any ATM in the world. He dug deeper, and the whole picture came to him.
His bank simply did not check the CVV code when withdrawing cash from an ATM or when entering a PIN code when purchasing with a debit card. In fact, the bank could not check the CVV code even if it wanted to. This is because the third-party processing network the bank used simply did not transmit the secret code. In fact, the Italian phishers could program random crap in place of the CVV code, and the card would still be accepted, as if that were the way it was supposed to be.
Then the specialist rerouted the bank transactions through another processing network and reprogrammed the servers to check the CVV code, and that same night, the mysterious disappearances from Italy stopped as if at the snap of a finger. But that was only the beginning. In 2004, almost half of American banks and credit unions still did not bother to check the CVV code for cash withdrawals and debit transactions.
Realizing this, hackers flooded Americans' inboxes with phishing emails aimed at collecting bank card numbers and PIN codes. Citibank, the largest consumer bank in the country, was perhaps the most high-profile victim of this scheme. This email was sent by the Citibank server to verify your email address, according to a message sent as a result of a spam wave from Russia in 2003.
You must complete this process by clicking on the link below and entering your Citibank card number and the PIN you use at ATMs in the small window. A more sophisticated message sent out in 2004 capitalized on consumer concerns about cybercrime. “There have been a number of recent attempts to steal personal information from Citibank customers,” the letter read. To protect your account, you need to update the PIN for your Citibank debit card.
Once you’re on the site, a complete replica of Citibank’s official website hosted on a server in China, you enter all the details the carder needs. PINs have always been worth their weight in gold among carders, and anyone who can get their hands on one is highly prized. One of the Carder Planet admins, King Arthur, was quite successful in this. The King was the head of an international network that specialized in attacking Citibank customers, and he was a legend in the world of carding.
One of Arthur's deputies said that in his prime, Arthur could earn $1 million a week. But King Arthur was just one of many Europeans who were cashing out in America. Max was also on trend and kept up with the others, he also joined the Citibank scam, but only in his own way. He infected the computer of an American casher under the nickname Tax with a Trojan and began intercepting the card numbers of the PIN code from his supplier.
After some time, Max realized that the supplier was King Arthur. He contacted the king and told him everything he had done, and also lied that Tax had been stealing from him on the sly. Arthur immediately refused to cooperate with Tax and began directly supplying his PIN codes to Max, so Max became his new casher. Therefore, when he returned from Caesar with his MSR-206, he decided to go into business on his own.
Max programmed a stack of Visa gift cards with his credentials and taped a sticker and paper with a PIN on each card. Then he would ride his bike or take a long walk, cashing the cards at ATMs in isolated areas with no security cameras. He would insert the card, enter the PIN, then the withdrawal amount, and the ATM would spit out the money like a slot machine. Max would pocket the money, write down the new, lower balance on the card in his notebook, look around carefully, and pull the next card from the deck.
To avoid leaving his fingerprints on the ATMs, he would press the buttons through a piece of paper, use his fingernails, or even coat his fingertips with hydroxyquinoline, a clear, sticky antiseptic sold in pharmacies as a liquid patch called “New Skin.” Max would faithfully send a fixed percentage of the withdrawals to Russia via Western Union Moneygram.
He was an honest criminal, no matter how stupid it may sound, he ran his business according to principles in a world where such concepts do not exist in principle. And even after Max got his own card writer, he continued to pass on some of the PIN codes to Chris, who squeezed everything out of the plastic that was on it. Max got a great deal on the losses of the bank's network, a few months later, together with Charity, he moved to a house in Coe Valley, San Francisco, the rent of which was 6 thousand dollars a month.
He installed a safe in it and threw a cutlet in it in the amount of 250 thousand bucks. It was good money that he made on this banking error. But still, his earnings were just a drop in the ocean for the banks that made a fatal mistake in their security with the CVV code. In 2005, experts from the analytical company Gartner found that this oversight cost the financial institution of the United States just under 3 billion dollars in one year.
Meanwhile, something suspicious was happening on Shadow Crew. In May 2004, a new administrator of the trading platform posted interesting offers that attracted a lot of attention. And although Max was not very interested in the news of the carding world, he was still extremely interested, and his inner instinct at that hour sounded the alarm. And the thing is that the new admin under the nickname Kambodzhoni presented to the frumchans his VPN service with a note exclusive to Shadow Crew members.
Any member with a good reputation could buy this VPN for only $ 30 per month and find peace of mind, Kambodzhoni assured. And in fact, he was not lying, because VPN allows you to encrypt every byte sent from your computer, which gives you V-shaped immunity from sniffing by a curious Internet provider or from law enforcement agencies that, waving surveillance warrants, will make your Internet provider show excessive interest in you.
In this case, any attempt to track the actions of the carders would lead only to the data center of Kambodjoni and nowhere further. But Max knew that VPN has one well-known drawback - all network traffic must pass through the main server, and at the same time be unencrypted, and therefore vulnerable to wiretapping. And if the feds really wanted to, they could get into the data center, change some VPN configurations and start collecting logs, and then the users of this VPN would have a hard time.
And although Kambodjo did not calm all the paranoids, saying that no one can touch his VPN without personal permission, for Max his words were worth nothing. Back when he was White Hat, he wrote a program for the Khan and Net project called PrivMSG - a Perl script that took data from a packet sniffer and used it to restore IRC chats.
In a nutshell, when a hacker was spotted trying to hack a computer during a decoy, he often used some program to correspond with his colleagues. And it was with the help of PrivMSG that WhiteHat could see all these correspondences. It was the necessary innovation in tracking hackers that gave way to digital wiretapping and opened a window into the culture and motives of anonymity. Max knew that exactly the same wiretapping could well be present in the VPN offered by Kambodzhoni.
There were other reasons for suspicion. When he, as usual, hacked random carders from the forum, he responded to one message to the ShadowCrew administration, which looked very much like instructions from the feds to their informant. Max could not shake the feeling that someone was turning ShadowCrew into one huge bait. He tried to warn the forum and voiced his concerns about the VPN, but his posts were immediately deleted, thereby letting Max know that he was 100% right.
Kambodzhoni appeared as an admin at the very end of Shadow Crew, at the moment when the legendary platform began to turn into a gathering of fucking children. The ill-mannered and stupid were noticed by one of the respected founders of the forum, nicknamed Galom Phan. A little earlier, Black Ops, another of the legendary founding fathers, also left.
He foolishly appointed Kambodjone as an admin, probably because Kambodjone was not stingy in epithets in his honor. “Black Ops, we will miss you, thank you for everything you have done for us,” Kambodjone wrote at the time. Nine months earlier, the New York police arrested a dark-skinned guy named Albert Gonzalez when he was withdrawing cash from a Chase ATM. At the time, he was 21 years old, he was from Miami, where his parents emigrated from Cuba.
He lived in a shabby $700-a-month apartment in Kearney, New Jersey, had debt on his mortgage, and no formal employment. But despite his young age, Gonzalez was a skilled hacker, and under the name Kambojone, he was a trusted confidant of carders around the world and, most importantly, a moderator on Shadow Crew. Taking this into account, Secret Service agents recruited Gonzalez to their cause, in order to one day deal the fatal blow to the forum. Kambojone
's VPN service looked like an invitation to a trap, and it was. The equipment was bought and paid for by the feds, and they then obtained warrants to spy on every user of the site. Every single one of Shadow Crew's biggest players was treacherously sucked into the Secret Service's wiretapped network. Cambodian VPN exposed the entire underbelly of the carder, which had previously been carefully hidden, all correspondence took place via email and instant messengers.
Transactions were carried out day and night, with the peak of orders on Sunday evenings, transactions ranged from harmlessly small to incredibly large. On May 19, agents observed a carder nicknamed Scarface transferring a database of 116 thousand credit card numbers to another forum member. Someone bought a fake British passport, and someone a driver's license or an Empire Blue Cross health insurance card.
In September, someone called Doc sold a database of 18 million hacked accounts and emails with names, passwords and dates of birth of users. The secret service worked 24/7, analyzing the entire activity of the forum. Each purchase was another merit in the guilty verdict. And the saddest thing was that Shadow Crew users voluntarily paid money to allow themselves to be monitored.
Don't let anyone spy on you, guys, better spy on me. For this, you will soon need a good VPN, and therefore under the video there will be a link to one from my friends. The idea is that they use Telegram to distribute VPN, which means our authorities will not be able to block or remove them from PlayMarket and AppStore, as has already happened with many famous VPN services presented on our market.
U-Fast VPN uses the OpenVPN Connect application and works on the OpenVPN protocol. This is an open source encryption protocol. In fact, you buy a subscription from the bot, it gives you the config of the location you need. Then you charge it in OpenVPN Connect and enjoy. There are no DNS or WebRTC leaks. Everything works stably and quickly, no log is kept. Thank you for your attention.
Max wasn't the only one who knew the Feds were running Shadow Crew. On July 28, 2004, a carder named Myth, who was one of King Arthur's drops, somehow found classified agency documents about Operation Firewall, and he openly bragged about it in chat. The Feds ordered Gonzales to immediately find and deal with the source of the leak. He contacted Myth and learned that the documents he had obtained were just a drop in the bucket of Secret Service data.
Myth knew about the subpoenas issued during the Shadow Crew investigation and even found his own ICQ account among the tapped ones. Luckily for the Feds, there was no mention of an informant in the leaked documents, meaning Kambojone was above suspicion. Myth refused to share the source of the information, but agreed to meet in an IRC chat, where he promised to invite his source. The next day, Gonzalez, Myth, and an unknown hacker using the temporary handle Anonymous met on IRC.
After talking to the latter, Gonzalez got the hacker to reveal his real handle, Efiks. He was a Shadow Crew salesman Kambojone had crossed paths with several times before. Things were starting to come together. In March, the Secret Service noticed that FX was selling access to the database of a major mobile operator, T-Mobile, offering a reverse lookup of subscriber information based on their phone number, he wrote in a forum post.
At worst, you’d get a name, Social Security number, and date of birth. At best, you’d get logins, passwords for accounts linked to the phone, a voicemail password, and a secret question and answer. As it later turned out, T-Mobile had failed to fix a critical security vulnerability in a commercial server application it had acquired from B-Systems.
The hole, discovered by outside researchers, was frustratingly easy to exploit, with an undocumented feature that allowed anyone to remotely view or replace any file on a system simply by sending it a crafted web request. In March 2003, B-Systems released a patch for the hole and publicly issued an advisory listing the vulnerability as a high-severity vulnerability. That July, the researchers who discovered the hole gave it even more attention, presenting it at Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas, the annual pre-DEFCON conference.
After learning of B-Systems’s vulnerability, Aphex wrote his own 20-line Visual Basic exploit and began scanning the web for potential targets that hadn’t yet installed the patch. By October 2003, he’d struck gold at T-Mobile. EFX had written his own front end for a customer database that he could access at any time.
First, he used his access to view the personal data of Hollywood stars, distributing explicit photos of Paris Hilton, Demi Moore Kutcher and Nicole Richie stolen from their Sidekick PDAs, and then began selling the data. In case you weren't aware, T-Mobile's Sidekick was a very popular PDA that debuted in the US in 2002. The second generation Sidekick in 2004 already brought the phone function, which made these smartphones an item for a variety of celebrities to buy.
Surf the Internet, read, send emails, listen to music, take photos or videos, the whole song. In 2006, the Sidekick 3 was released, a much improved model that sold quite well. Until some guy in a sweatshirt introduced it in 2007, leaving the world with the iPhone.
It was obvious that Hacker Efiks had been sidekicked by one of the Secret Service agents, but the Feds were more upset not by the fact that the device had been hacked, which could have jeopardized the entire operation, but by the fact that the hell any agent was storing classified materials on their PDA, thereby violating agency policy. Of course, the order was given from above to urgently find both individuals, the one who had hacked and the one who had been hacked. The first was easy, a simple Google search for the ICQ FX number found his real name.
It was 21-year-old programmer Nicholas Jacobsen, who had moved from Oregon to Irvine, California, to get a job as a network administrator. But having forgotten about legitimate work, he began making good money on Shadow Crew, offering various hacking services. Gonzalez had another chance to prove his worth to the agency. He had to test Nicholas's trust.
They spent a few days talking about hacking tricks, after which Albert offered him his advertised VPN for free and said that with its help he would be able to use T-Mobile’s database even more securely. Then Jacobson bought the trick, and the Secret Service was able to watch as FX later logged into T-Mobile’s customer service website. To log in, he used the username and password of New York agent Peter Kovicius, a veteran of the cybercrime unit who distinguished himself by catching a former OAEIL employee named Jason Smutters.
He leaked 92 million customer email addresses and sold them to spammers. The leak was found, a couple of months later, despite all his regalia, Kovicius was forced to quietly resign, and FX was added to the list of targets for Operation Firewall. Meanwhile, the once great Carder Planet was living out his last days.
In May 2003, Maxim Kovalchuk, one of the CarderPlanet family members, was arrested in Thailand, where he was vacationing with his wife. Before the trip, he changed his last name to his wife's last name and became Maxim Vysochansky. It didn't help. In May 2004, he was extradited to the States, where he was imprisoned for three years. In February 2003, Roman Vega, better known as Boa, was arrested in Cyprus.
This event was a huge blow to the carders from the planet. They were shocked that the feds were able to take the best among them. And indeed, Boa was always a cut above everyone else, his arrival on the carder planet was akin to the arrival of beloved Batya. He was older than everyone, knew how to say the right things, skillfully wielded words, which allowed him to quickly become an authority in the eyes of the entire community. People like Boa brought a certain ideology, a code of conduct and honor to the forum, at least everyone wanted to think so.
Because the same Boa, despite all his righteous zeal, could throw you out with a pack of dumps by selling non-working crap, and attempts to settle a dispute with him often ended in vain. Due to disagreements with his family, Vega left the planet and, like a turtleneck guy, opened his own company, a very successful one. And when the planet's affairs got worse, its main shareholders asked Boa to come back, and he, like Steve Jobs, returned to the sounds of fanfare.
But this is not a tale about the formation of Apple, the planet of carders does not have and could not have a happy ending. And this is not at all because the planet was flooded with Rippers and Diatls in its last years of life, but because foreign intelligence services, especially American ones, were aware of all the movements on the forum. Having realized this in 2004, Script gave a touching speech and left to settle in, appointing King Arthur as the eldest.
A few months later, on July 28, 2004, King Arthur announced the closure of the planet, which horrified everyone. In his post in broken English, he wrote "FBI employees go to AOL like they were their own home, reading our ICQ logs. No matter how smart we all are, how many proxies and socks we use, no matter what dark corner of the earth the VPN is located through which we go.
We are all people, and we all have a human factor. We understand perfectly well that, unfortunately, many will lose their jobs, many will simply no longer be able to log in and communicate with like-minded people, but we are no longer going to expose our ass to the law for someone else's earnings. Chelom. With this farewell note, King Arthur, a dollar millionaire, became a legend of carding.
He will be remembered as the man who carefully closed the great Carder Planet before the feds enjoyed its destruction. At that time, the script was already on the international wanted list; on July 7, 2005, he was arrested in Odessa by Ukrainian security forces. More than 20 volumes of evidence of his guilt were presented to the court, but fortunately or unfortunately, no one bothered to delve into them. "I don't have time to reread dozens of volumes of the case," the prosecutor said.
They say that important people from the government stood up for the script then, and therefore he was released on bail. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then, but who would have thought today that this good man was the father of CarderPlanet.
Low temperatures this winter have challenged not only people, but also birds. That is why our team decided to allocate 800 kilograms of lard from our own reserves to really support the city's tits, as well as the visiting guests of the Southern Palmyra.
I think that the Virgin Mary herself shed a tear at the moment when he secured this huge piece of lard to a branch. But be that as it may, the leaders and key participants of Shadow Crew, unlike the script, were not so lucky. On October 26, 2004, 16 Secret Service agents gathered together in the Washington command center to begin Operation Fairwall. Their targets were marked on a map of the United States, and the agents knew that all the cybercriminals would be home.
At the behest of the Secret Service, Gonzalez arranged an online meeting for that evening, and no one turned him down. At 9 p.m., agents armed with MP5 semiautomatic assault rifles simultaneously raided the homes of Shadow Crew members across the country, capturing the three founders, hacker Tim Bile, and 17 plastic sellers. It was the largest crackdown on carders in American history.
Two days later, a federal jury returned 62 indictments and the Justice Department unveiled Operation Firewall. The indictment struck at the heart of an organization that was allegedly a one-stop marketplace for hackers and carders from around the world,” Attorney General John Ashward boasted in a press release. “The Justice Department is committed to catching all of the scammers involved, whether they’re online or offline,” he said.
With Gonzalez’s help, agents blocked the remaining 4,000 users of the forum and changed the site’s home page. The header featured a U.S. Secret Service insignia, and just below it, the iconic slogan, “For those who like to play in the shadows. A photo of the man behind bars, and, to top it all off, a new motto: You’re no longer anonymous.” Panicked, carders around the world devoured the news and television broadcasts.
Worried about their future, they gathered on a small forum called Stealth Division to assess the damage and count the number of survivors. They were terrified. It slowly dawned on the forum that Kambodjoni’s name had not been mentioned among the defendants. That’s when he logged into the IRC chat, as if nothing had happened, to make a final statement. "I want everyone to know I'm on the run and I have no fucking idea how the Secret Service was able to do what they did," Gonzalez wrote.
From the news, I can tell that they were somehow listening to my VPN, and therefore the entire Shadow Crew. This is my last post, good luck to everyone!
Carder Planet was shut down, and now Shadow Crew has joined it, and its leaders, all but Gonzalez, were locked up in prison. The carders were exhausted and confused, as if they had been thrown out of their home. It will be many years before anyone dares to create a bulletin board akin to Shadow Crew, wrote one of the former forum members. And when that happens, if it does, law enforcement will destroy everything again.
And knowing this, I doubt anyone will risk starting all over again. But there was one man in the world who was ready to risk everything once again. His name was Max Butler.
And we are not carders, man, no, we are not carders. There on the planet we lost our ranks. People tend to make mistakes, in ordinary life the cost of a mistake is not great, but everything is different if you are a cybercriminal.
The slightest oversight and the feds are already knocking on your door. It happened in the South of Market area of San Francisco. There Chris and the girls checked into the posh W Hotel to go for a couple of runs around the local shopping centers. He was very surprised when the phone rang in his room, it was the front desk calling, his credit card was declined.
He took the elevator down to the hotel lobby, pulled a new card out of his wallet, and watched the administrator with a straight face as he swiped the cards through the terminal. The transaction was declined, the administrator said. Chris quickly pulled out a third card and thrust it into the hands of the young man, who seemed to be suspicious of something. Another refusal, and only with the fourth card did Chris finally manage to pay for the rooms, but while he was going back up in the elevator to his floor, the vigilant administrator was already dialing the bank number.
A couple of hours later, the San Francisco Police Department knocked on Chris's door. The cops handcuffed him without asking questions and searched his room and car. As a result, they confiscated his Sony laptop, MSR-206, and his car, an SUV with a changed VIN number.
It is not surprising that Chris ended up in the county jail; having paid for the rooms in cash, such a problem would never have happened. And so Max was beside himself with anger when he found out what had happened. And although Aragon quickly got out of this mess a month later, receiving a three-year suspended sentence, Butler decided that he could not rely solely on his accomplice, and he resorted to a backup plan. Max would learn the carding craft, and at the same time he needed to check Chris.
Lately, he had been paying poorly and complained that 100 credit cards were only about 50 valid, and only half of them could be used to buy something for subsequent sale, and cards with a protective limit of 500 bucks were only good for filling up a car or buying food. Chris also had expenses, the expanding business required his team to constantly fly to distant cities, and plane tickets were not getting cheaper.
In addition, he paid rent for an apartment at Villa Sieni, where he ran his credit card factory. But Butler did not particularly care about other people's difficulties, he finally began to enjoy life. Using forged documents, he rented a spacious penthouse in the Fillmore district. In these locations, Max and Charity lived, fucked, and programmed. Charity was coding something for her legal job, while Max continued to fleece the naive carders from Carder Planet and Shadow Crew, and also planned a new hack.
But first he needed to get his hands on an MCP-206 writer and he didn't want Chris to know about it. It didn't take long to find a reliable supplier of the equipment. People of Shadow Crew and the planet always knew that everything necessary for carding was available from a seller named UbuyWeRush. Butler made inquiries, it turned out that in one of the shopping centers of Los Angeles there was a retail store with a similar name.
Finding himself on its doorstep, Max was met by none other than the owner of the store, the legendary Caesar Carenza. At that time, carders from all over the world, vacationing in California, stopped just to see the famous You Buy We Rush warehouse with their own eyes and shake Caesar's hand. Caesar got into carding in the early 90s, in 98 he folded his rods to find himself in life. He graduated from Devry University in 2001 with a degree in computer programming, hoping to find a job on the Internet.
But not finding anything suitable for the position of a programmer, he decided to try himself as an independent businessman. From an advertisement in Delhi, Kamerson learned about an upcoming auction at a public storage facility in Long Beach, where owners were selling off the contents of their long-abandoned garages. They were locked, so only God knew what was in them. In America and Europe, such events have been held for a very long time.
The background of the things that ended up at the sale, as a rule, has one scenario. A person, in order not to clutter his apartment, rents a container and places all his junk in it. Then, for some reason, he stops or forgets to pay the rent and he is sent notifications about forgotten things. The person ignores the notifications and does not pay the rent, and then the company puts him in the garage with his things up for auction.
Having got to this auction, Caesar was pleasantly surprised. It turned out to be not just an auction, but some kind of peculiar ritual. The manager with a bolt cutter in his hands opened the locks one by one, and the buyers examined the contents of the garage, but only from where they stood, at a distance of six meters. In a fair fight, one of the participants in the auction, having offered a higher price, took all the contents of the storage.
The winner hung his lock and was obliged to clean out the container within 24 hours. And although Cesar was not prepared, like the other participants, he had more than enough desire to win. At the very first auction, he was the only one who agreed to give one tank for a closet with old clothes in an empty garage. It would seem one dollar for a closet with rags, and nevertheless, the enterprising Cesar sold all those clothes on Ebay for 60 bucks.
Corenzo was a born businessman, he could sell anything, even underwear with a cherkash, and you would buy the cherkash separately. He thought that he had found his little niche and began to regularly attend such auctions and liquidations of enterprises, where they sold everything they no longer needed for a pittance, taking large lots and selling everything on eBay. Caesar invested the money he earned in this way in his business and opened a store in a shopping center on Long Beach.
He received various goods, office furniture, sun loungers, jeans and again sold everything on the Internet. It was a good honest job, unlike carding. He was happy selling on eBay, but memories of the past one day painted a question in his head. Is there a store specializing in selling the equipment that he used as a fraudster?
Finding that there were none online, Cesar decided to give it a try, he bought a few MSR-206 from suppliers and put them up for sale on the YouBuyWeRush store on eBay. And imagine his surprise when all the equipment was bought up in a couple of days. Later, one of the buyers told Cesar about a website where he could sell even more goods and even faster. He introduced Cesar to the script, who personally gave the green light to his shop on the Planet carder, and so UbuyWeRush appeared on the planet.
In the welcome post, Cesar wrote "I decided to help you guys make big money. So if you need me, I sell card printers, embossers, hot stamping tips, miniature skimmers and much more. I know this sounds like an advertisement, but I do all this for you, my store is a safe place to shop.
Things took off quickly, Caesar created his own website, and began selling on Shadow Crew, and soon had about 800 regular customers. His reputation as a seller grew every day, and new customers came to him without fear to buy from him. With a customer in every time zone, he answered calls 24 hours a day, guaranteed same-day shipping, and had good relations with his competitors.
So if he ran out of an item, he could easily buy more from his comrades to fulfill his obligations and keep customers happy no matter what. Such strategic decisions soon turned Yubayu and Rush into the best supplier of equipment for the global community of carders and hackers. Selling equipment itself was not illegal, as long as you did not sell it for fraudulent purposes. Incidentally, Caesar also had legitimate customers who bought equipment to make corporate ID cards and school lunch vouchers.
Over time, the orders became so numerous that Caesar posted a job posting and began hiring employees to take inventory, pack, and ship the goods. When neighboring offices opened, he annexed them for additional storage space, first doubling, then tripling his space. Fascinated by the global reach of his marketplace, he hung a map on the wall and marked each city with a pin as he shipped an order.
Six months later, the map showed pins for states in Canada, Europe, Africa, and Asia. A dense metal forest had sprung up in southwestern Russia near the Black Sea and, of course, Ukraine. Max was briefly fascinated by the map, since his malware had a similar geography. He took the MSR-206 and left the store in a hurry.
Now Max could do more than Chris and her girls. He could insert the plastic into an ATM and take all the cash at once. That was the whole point of cashing out, to get money and not goods that were sold for only a fraction of their value. The thing was, Butler was involved in one of the biggest mistakes in banking history, which the lucky cardholders will never know.
A commercial bank in Kansas, Missouri, was probably the first to figure out what was going on. In 2003, a bank security specialist was surprised to notice that $10,000 to $20,000 a day was disappearing from customer accounts. Someone was withdrawing money from ATMs in Italy. He would come to the bank on Monday and see a terrible picture, his bank had lost about $70,000 over the weekend. During his personal investigation, he would discover that all the customers had fallen victim to a phishing attack aimed at collecting bank card numbers and PIN codes.
But something was wrong, in Part 5 I said that the CVV code was designed specifically for this case and was supposed to prevent such a scheme. Without this code programmed into the magnetic strip of plastic cards, the data collected by phishing should not work at any ATM in the world. He dug deeper, and the whole picture came to him.
His bank simply did not check the CVV code when withdrawing cash from an ATM or when entering a PIN code when purchasing with a debit card. In fact, the bank could not check the CVV code even if it wanted to. This is because the third-party processing network the bank used simply did not transmit the secret code. In fact, the Italian phishers could program random crap in place of the CVV code, and the card would still be accepted, as if that were the way it was supposed to be.
Then the specialist rerouted the bank transactions through another processing network and reprogrammed the servers to check the CVV code, and that same night, the mysterious disappearances from Italy stopped as if at the snap of a finger. But that was only the beginning. In 2004, almost half of American banks and credit unions still did not bother to check the CVV code for cash withdrawals and debit transactions.
Realizing this, hackers flooded Americans' inboxes with phishing emails aimed at collecting bank card numbers and PIN codes. Citibank, the largest consumer bank in the country, was perhaps the most high-profile victim of this scheme. This email was sent by the Citibank server to verify your email address, according to a message sent as a result of a spam wave from Russia in 2003.
You must complete this process by clicking on the link below and entering your Citibank card number and the PIN you use at ATMs in the small window. A more sophisticated message sent out in 2004 capitalized on consumer concerns about cybercrime. “There have been a number of recent attempts to steal personal information from Citibank customers,” the letter read. To protect your account, you need to update the PIN for your Citibank debit card.
Once you’re on the site, a complete replica of Citibank’s official website hosted on a server in China, you enter all the details the carder needs. PINs have always been worth their weight in gold among carders, and anyone who can get their hands on one is highly prized. One of the Carder Planet admins, King Arthur, was quite successful in this. The King was the head of an international network that specialized in attacking Citibank customers, and he was a legend in the world of carding.
One of Arthur's deputies said that in his prime, Arthur could earn $1 million a week. But King Arthur was just one of many Europeans who were cashing out in America. Max was also on trend and kept up with the others, he also joined the Citibank scam, but only in his own way. He infected the computer of an American casher under the nickname Tax with a Trojan and began intercepting the card numbers of the PIN code from his supplier.
After some time, Max realized that the supplier was King Arthur. He contacted the king and told him everything he had done, and also lied that Tax had been stealing from him on the sly. Arthur immediately refused to cooperate with Tax and began directly supplying his PIN codes to Max, so Max became his new casher. Therefore, when he returned from Caesar with his MSR-206, he decided to go into business on his own.
Max programmed a stack of Visa gift cards with his credentials and taped a sticker and paper with a PIN on each card. Then he would ride his bike or take a long walk, cashing the cards at ATMs in isolated areas with no security cameras. He would insert the card, enter the PIN, then the withdrawal amount, and the ATM would spit out the money like a slot machine. Max would pocket the money, write down the new, lower balance on the card in his notebook, look around carefully, and pull the next card from the deck.
To avoid leaving his fingerprints on the ATMs, he would press the buttons through a piece of paper, use his fingernails, or even coat his fingertips with hydroxyquinoline, a clear, sticky antiseptic sold in pharmacies as a liquid patch called “New Skin.” Max would faithfully send a fixed percentage of the withdrawals to Russia via Western Union Moneygram.
He was an honest criminal, no matter how stupid it may sound, he ran his business according to principles in a world where such concepts do not exist in principle. And even after Max got his own card writer, he continued to pass on some of the PIN codes to Chris, who squeezed everything out of the plastic that was on it. Max got a great deal on the losses of the bank's network, a few months later, together with Charity, he moved to a house in Coe Valley, San Francisco, the rent of which was 6 thousand dollars a month.
He installed a safe in it and threw a cutlet in it in the amount of 250 thousand bucks. It was good money that he made on this banking error. But still, his earnings were just a drop in the ocean for the banks that made a fatal mistake in their security with the CVV code. In 2005, experts from the analytical company Gartner found that this oversight cost the financial institution of the United States just under 3 billion dollars in one year.
Meanwhile, something suspicious was happening on Shadow Crew. In May 2004, a new administrator of the trading platform posted interesting offers that attracted a lot of attention. And although Max was not very interested in the news of the carding world, he was still extremely interested, and his inner instinct at that hour sounded the alarm. And the thing is that the new admin under the nickname Kambodzhoni presented to the frumchans his VPN service with a note exclusive to Shadow Crew members.
Any member with a good reputation could buy this VPN for only $ 30 per month and find peace of mind, Kambodzhoni assured. And in fact, he was not lying, because VPN allows you to encrypt every byte sent from your computer, which gives you V-shaped immunity from sniffing by a curious Internet provider or from law enforcement agencies that, waving surveillance warrants, will make your Internet provider show excessive interest in you.
In this case, any attempt to track the actions of the carders would lead only to the data center of Kambodjoni and nowhere further. But Max knew that VPN has one well-known drawback - all network traffic must pass through the main server, and at the same time be unencrypted, and therefore vulnerable to wiretapping. And if the feds really wanted to, they could get into the data center, change some VPN configurations and start collecting logs, and then the users of this VPN would have a hard time.
And although Kambodjo did not calm all the paranoids, saying that no one can touch his VPN without personal permission, for Max his words were worth nothing. Back when he was White Hat, he wrote a program for the Khan and Net project called PrivMSG - a Perl script that took data from a packet sniffer and used it to restore IRC chats.
In a nutshell, when a hacker was spotted trying to hack a computer during a decoy, he often used some program to correspond with his colleagues. And it was with the help of PrivMSG that WhiteHat could see all these correspondences. It was the necessary innovation in tracking hackers that gave way to digital wiretapping and opened a window into the culture and motives of anonymity. Max knew that exactly the same wiretapping could well be present in the VPN offered by Kambodzhoni.
There were other reasons for suspicion. When he, as usual, hacked random carders from the forum, he responded to one message to the ShadowCrew administration, which looked very much like instructions from the feds to their informant. Max could not shake the feeling that someone was turning ShadowCrew into one huge bait. He tried to warn the forum and voiced his concerns about the VPN, but his posts were immediately deleted, thereby letting Max know that he was 100% right.
Kambodzhoni appeared as an admin at the very end of Shadow Crew, at the moment when the legendary platform began to turn into a gathering of fucking children. The ill-mannered and stupid were noticed by one of the respected founders of the forum, nicknamed Galom Phan. A little earlier, Black Ops, another of the legendary founding fathers, also left.
He foolishly appointed Kambodjone as an admin, probably because Kambodjone was not stingy in epithets in his honor. “Black Ops, we will miss you, thank you for everything you have done for us,” Kambodjone wrote at the time. Nine months earlier, the New York police arrested a dark-skinned guy named Albert Gonzalez when he was withdrawing cash from a Chase ATM. At the time, he was 21 years old, he was from Miami, where his parents emigrated from Cuba.
He lived in a shabby $700-a-month apartment in Kearney, New Jersey, had debt on his mortgage, and no formal employment. But despite his young age, Gonzalez was a skilled hacker, and under the name Kambojone, he was a trusted confidant of carders around the world and, most importantly, a moderator on Shadow Crew. Taking this into account, Secret Service agents recruited Gonzalez to their cause, in order to one day deal the fatal blow to the forum. Kambojone
's VPN service looked like an invitation to a trap, and it was. The equipment was bought and paid for by the feds, and they then obtained warrants to spy on every user of the site. Every single one of Shadow Crew's biggest players was treacherously sucked into the Secret Service's wiretapped network. Cambodian VPN exposed the entire underbelly of the carder, which had previously been carefully hidden, all correspondence took place via email and instant messengers.
Transactions were carried out day and night, with the peak of orders on Sunday evenings, transactions ranged from harmlessly small to incredibly large. On May 19, agents observed a carder nicknamed Scarface transferring a database of 116 thousand credit card numbers to another forum member. Someone bought a fake British passport, and someone a driver's license or an Empire Blue Cross health insurance card.
In September, someone called Doc sold a database of 18 million hacked accounts and emails with names, passwords and dates of birth of users. The secret service worked 24/7, analyzing the entire activity of the forum. Each purchase was another merit in the guilty verdict. And the saddest thing was that Shadow Crew users voluntarily paid money to allow themselves to be monitored.
Don't let anyone spy on you, guys, better spy on me. For this, you will soon need a good VPN, and therefore under the video there will be a link to one from my friends. The idea is that they use Telegram to distribute VPN, which means our authorities will not be able to block or remove them from PlayMarket and AppStore, as has already happened with many famous VPN services presented on our market.
U-Fast VPN uses the OpenVPN Connect application and works on the OpenVPN protocol. This is an open source encryption protocol. In fact, you buy a subscription from the bot, it gives you the config of the location you need. Then you charge it in OpenVPN Connect and enjoy. There are no DNS or WebRTC leaks. Everything works stably and quickly, no log is kept. Thank you for your attention.
Max wasn't the only one who knew the Feds were running Shadow Crew. On July 28, 2004, a carder named Myth, who was one of King Arthur's drops, somehow found classified agency documents about Operation Firewall, and he openly bragged about it in chat. The Feds ordered Gonzales to immediately find and deal with the source of the leak. He contacted Myth and learned that the documents he had obtained were just a drop in the bucket of Secret Service data.
Myth knew about the subpoenas issued during the Shadow Crew investigation and even found his own ICQ account among the tapped ones. Luckily for the Feds, there was no mention of an informant in the leaked documents, meaning Kambojone was above suspicion. Myth refused to share the source of the information, but agreed to meet in an IRC chat, where he promised to invite his source. The next day, Gonzalez, Myth, and an unknown hacker using the temporary handle Anonymous met on IRC.
After talking to the latter, Gonzalez got the hacker to reveal his real handle, Efiks. He was a Shadow Crew salesman Kambojone had crossed paths with several times before. Things were starting to come together. In March, the Secret Service noticed that FX was selling access to the database of a major mobile operator, T-Mobile, offering a reverse lookup of subscriber information based on their phone number, he wrote in a forum post.
At worst, you’d get a name, Social Security number, and date of birth. At best, you’d get logins, passwords for accounts linked to the phone, a voicemail password, and a secret question and answer. As it later turned out, T-Mobile had failed to fix a critical security vulnerability in a commercial server application it had acquired from B-Systems.
The hole, discovered by outside researchers, was frustratingly easy to exploit, with an undocumented feature that allowed anyone to remotely view or replace any file on a system simply by sending it a crafted web request. In March 2003, B-Systems released a patch for the hole and publicly issued an advisory listing the vulnerability as a high-severity vulnerability. That July, the researchers who discovered the hole gave it even more attention, presenting it at Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas, the annual pre-DEFCON conference.
After learning of B-Systems’s vulnerability, Aphex wrote his own 20-line Visual Basic exploit and began scanning the web for potential targets that hadn’t yet installed the patch. By October 2003, he’d struck gold at T-Mobile. EFX had written his own front end for a customer database that he could access at any time.
First, he used his access to view the personal data of Hollywood stars, distributing explicit photos of Paris Hilton, Demi Moore Kutcher and Nicole Richie stolen from their Sidekick PDAs, and then began selling the data. In case you weren't aware, T-Mobile's Sidekick was a very popular PDA that debuted in the US in 2002. The second generation Sidekick in 2004 already brought the phone function, which made these smartphones an item for a variety of celebrities to buy.
Surf the Internet, read, send emails, listen to music, take photos or videos, the whole song. In 2006, the Sidekick 3 was released, a much improved model that sold quite well. Until some guy in a sweatshirt introduced it in 2007, leaving the world with the iPhone.
It was obvious that Hacker Efiks had been sidekicked by one of the Secret Service agents, but the Feds were more upset not by the fact that the device had been hacked, which could have jeopardized the entire operation, but by the fact that the hell any agent was storing classified materials on their PDA, thereby violating agency policy. Of course, the order was given from above to urgently find both individuals, the one who had hacked and the one who had been hacked. The first was easy, a simple Google search for the ICQ FX number found his real name.
It was 21-year-old programmer Nicholas Jacobsen, who had moved from Oregon to Irvine, California, to get a job as a network administrator. But having forgotten about legitimate work, he began making good money on Shadow Crew, offering various hacking services. Gonzalez had another chance to prove his worth to the agency. He had to test Nicholas's trust.
They spent a few days talking about hacking tricks, after which Albert offered him his advertised VPN for free and said that with its help he would be able to use T-Mobile’s database even more securely. Then Jacobson bought the trick, and the Secret Service was able to watch as FX later logged into T-Mobile’s customer service website. To log in, he used the username and password of New York agent Peter Kovicius, a veteran of the cybercrime unit who distinguished himself by catching a former OAEIL employee named Jason Smutters.
He leaked 92 million customer email addresses and sold them to spammers. The leak was found, a couple of months later, despite all his regalia, Kovicius was forced to quietly resign, and FX was added to the list of targets for Operation Firewall. Meanwhile, the once great Carder Planet was living out his last days.
In May 2003, Maxim Kovalchuk, one of the CarderPlanet family members, was arrested in Thailand, where he was vacationing with his wife. Before the trip, he changed his last name to his wife's last name and became Maxim Vysochansky. It didn't help. In May 2004, he was extradited to the States, where he was imprisoned for three years. In February 2003, Roman Vega, better known as Boa, was arrested in Cyprus.
This event was a huge blow to the carders from the planet. They were shocked that the feds were able to take the best among them. And indeed, Boa was always a cut above everyone else, his arrival on the carder planet was akin to the arrival of beloved Batya. He was older than everyone, knew how to say the right things, skillfully wielded words, which allowed him to quickly become an authority in the eyes of the entire community. People like Boa brought a certain ideology, a code of conduct and honor to the forum, at least everyone wanted to think so.
Because the same Boa, despite all his righteous zeal, could throw you out with a pack of dumps by selling non-working crap, and attempts to settle a dispute with him often ended in vain. Due to disagreements with his family, Vega left the planet and, like a turtleneck guy, opened his own company, a very successful one. And when the planet's affairs got worse, its main shareholders asked Boa to come back, and he, like Steve Jobs, returned to the sounds of fanfare.
But this is not a tale about the formation of Apple, the planet of carders does not have and could not have a happy ending. And this is not at all because the planet was flooded with Rippers and Diatls in its last years of life, but because foreign intelligence services, especially American ones, were aware of all the movements on the forum. Having realized this in 2004, Script gave a touching speech and left to settle in, appointing King Arthur as the eldest.
A few months later, on July 28, 2004, King Arthur announced the closure of the planet, which horrified everyone. In his post in broken English, he wrote "FBI employees go to AOL like they were their own home, reading our ICQ logs. No matter how smart we all are, how many proxies and socks we use, no matter what dark corner of the earth the VPN is located through which we go.
We are all people, and we all have a human factor. We understand perfectly well that, unfortunately, many will lose their jobs, many will simply no longer be able to log in and communicate with like-minded people, but we are no longer going to expose our ass to the law for someone else's earnings. Chelom. With this farewell note, King Arthur, a dollar millionaire, became a legend of carding.
He will be remembered as the man who carefully closed the great Carder Planet before the feds enjoyed its destruction. At that time, the script was already on the international wanted list; on July 7, 2005, he was arrested in Odessa by Ukrainian security forces. More than 20 volumes of evidence of his guilt were presented to the court, but fortunately or unfortunately, no one bothered to delve into them. "I don't have time to reread dozens of volumes of the case," the prosecutor said.
They say that important people from the government stood up for the script then, and therefore he was released on bail. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then, but who would have thought today that this good man was the father of CarderPlanet.
Low temperatures this winter have challenged not only people, but also birds. That is why our team decided to allocate 800 kilograms of lard from our own reserves to really support the city's tits, as well as the visiting guests of the Southern Palmyra.
I think that the Virgin Mary herself shed a tear at the moment when he secured this huge piece of lard to a branch. But be that as it may, the leaders and key participants of Shadow Crew, unlike the script, were not so lucky. On October 26, 2004, 16 Secret Service agents gathered together in the Washington command center to begin Operation Fairwall. Their targets were marked on a map of the United States, and the agents knew that all the cybercriminals would be home.
At the behest of the Secret Service, Gonzalez arranged an online meeting for that evening, and no one turned him down. At 9 p.m., agents armed with MP5 semiautomatic assault rifles simultaneously raided the homes of Shadow Crew members across the country, capturing the three founders, hacker Tim Bile, and 17 plastic sellers. It was the largest crackdown on carders in American history.
Two days later, a federal jury returned 62 indictments and the Justice Department unveiled Operation Firewall. The indictment struck at the heart of an organization that was allegedly a one-stop marketplace for hackers and carders from around the world,” Attorney General John Ashward boasted in a press release. “The Justice Department is committed to catching all of the scammers involved, whether they’re online or offline,” he said.
With Gonzalez’s help, agents blocked the remaining 4,000 users of the forum and changed the site’s home page. The header featured a U.S. Secret Service insignia, and just below it, the iconic slogan, “For those who like to play in the shadows. A photo of the man behind bars, and, to top it all off, a new motto: You’re no longer anonymous.” Panicked, carders around the world devoured the news and television broadcasts.
Worried about their future, they gathered on a small forum called Stealth Division to assess the damage and count the number of survivors. They were terrified. It slowly dawned on the forum that Kambodjoni’s name had not been mentioned among the defendants. That’s when he logged into the IRC chat, as if nothing had happened, to make a final statement. "I want everyone to know I'm on the run and I have no fucking idea how the Secret Service was able to do what they did," Gonzalez wrote.
From the news, I can tell that they were somehow listening to my VPN, and therefore the entire Shadow Crew. This is my last post, good luck to everyone!
Carder Planet was shut down, and now Shadow Crew has joined it, and its leaders, all but Gonzalez, were locked up in prison. The carders were exhausted and confused, as if they had been thrown out of their home. It will be many years before anyone dares to create a bulletin board akin to Shadow Crew, wrote one of the former forum members. And when that happens, if it does, law enforcement will destroy everything again.
And knowing this, I doubt anyone will risk starting all over again. But there was one man in the world who was ready to risk everything once again. His name was Max Butler.
