📸 Photo

KINGPIN

Chris loaded blank PVC cards into the hopper of an unwieldy ob-long machine called a Fargo HDP600 card printer, a $5,000 device used to print corporate ID cards. With a click on his laptop, the machine drew a card into its maw and hummed once, twice, a third, and a fourth time, each sound marking another color as it moved to a clear transfer ribbon and was rapidly vaporized by heating elements and fused to the surface of the card. A final low grinding from the Fargo meant a clear laminate coat was settling over the plastic.

It was forty-four seconds from start to finish, and then the machine spat out the card—a glossy, brightly colored consumer objet d'art. A bald eagle staring purposefully at a Capitol One logo, or the grim American Express centurion, or the simple smudge of sky blue across the white face of a Sony-branded MasterCard. For the high-limit cards, the process was the same, except sometimes Chris would start with gold- or platinum-colored PVC stock, purchased, like the white cards, in boxes of hundreds.

Once he had a pile of freshly printed plastic in hand, Chris moved to a second stop in the assembly line: a monochrome printer for the fine print on the back of the card. Then if the design called for a hologram, he'd pluck a sheet of Chinese-produced counterfeits from a stack, align it carefully in a die punch, and pull the lever to cut out an oval or rounded rectangle the size of a postage stamp. A $2,000 Kwikprint Model 55 heat stamper, resembling a drill press crossed with a medieval torture instrument, fused the metal foil to the surface of the PVC.

The embosser was next: a giant motorized carousel wheel of letters and numbers that sounded like an IBM Selectric as it banged the name, account number, and expiration date one character at a time into the plastic, tipping each with silver or gold foil. From a Chinese supplier, Chris had obtained the special security keys for Visa's "flying V" and MasterCard's joined "MC"—two distinctive raised characters found only on credit cards, real and fake.

Credit card verification systems don't check the customer's name,