Thus was the beginning of Thomas’ turn to the other side. For 18 months beginning in April 2003, Thomas worked as a “paid asset” for the FBI running a website for identity and credit card thieves from a government-supplied apartment in the tony Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle.From bedrise to bedrest, seven days a week, he rode the boards and forums of his and other carding sites using the online nickname El Mariachi. He recorded private messages and IRC chats for the FBI as “carders” schemed to, among other things, sell stolen credit and debit card numbers, defraud the George Bush and John Kerry campaign sites, drain hundreds of thousands of dollars from bank and investment accounts, sell access to Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account and run phishing scams against U.S. Bank and the FDIC. He did it all while battling denial-of-service attacks against his site and dodging attempts by his old partner Taylor and other carders to track his whereabouts and out him as a fed.
Just as his enemies were closing in on him in September 2004, the FBI pulled the plug on his work and cut him loose. But not before Thomas had given authorities a valuable look at the internet’s underworld, even though the strain of leading a double life nearly broke him.
Now Thomas is telling the story of his work during this period. It’s a tale that provides a rare glimpse of the thriving international computer underground of high and low-tech thieves and swindlers whose crimes cost millions each year. It also illuminates the rarely seen world of federal law enforcement’s war against these organized criminals, and the moral and ethical tradeoffs sworn agents make in pursuing their mission — providing crooks with an electronic marketplace where they can congregate and conduct their ignominious business anonymously. Even allowing some crimes to go unpunished.
[Read the article at Wired News]
OK… the article is 4 pages long. But it feels longer. The editor tried doing editing Pulp Fiction style… at least it feels that way. The story bounces all over. But over all the story is scary in the breadth of the loss, and how little the FBI actually did. Mind, what they where doing wouldn’t of provided them anything they could use in a court of law (it would of been considered entrapment). But the fact they let so many things slide… well scared me.
It’s a good overview of the world a carder lives… and talks a lot about what the FBI learned about the business. And how open they are. There are some truly interesting gems, and I think if you can get through the bad editing… you’ll really like the story itself. It reads like a freaking movie.
