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UBUYWERUSH

Canada, Europe, Africa, and Asia. An impenetrable forest of metal grew southwest of Russia on the Black Sea. Ukraine.

Chris had become friends with Cesar. He’d even had him over for dinner, along with Mrs. UBuyWeRush, Clara, and Chris’s two boys—well-mannered kids who stayed at the dinner table all the way through dessert. Chris particularly liked hanging out at Cesar’s office. You never knew who would show up at UBuyWeRush. Carders too paranoid to have counterfeiting gear shipped even to a drop would make a pilgrimage to Los Angeles to pick up their items in person, opening the front door through their shirtsleeve to leave no prints and paying in cash. Foreign carders vacationing in California would stop by just to see the legendary warehouse with their own eyes and shake Cesar’s hand.

On this day, the man walking in to pick up an MSR206 was the last person Chris expected to see in Cesar’s shop, a six-foot-five hacker with a long ponytail.

Chris was stunned; Max rarely left San Francisco these days, and he hadn’t said anything about coming to town. Max was equally surprised to see Chris. They exchanged pleasantries awkwardly.

There was only one reason Max would sneak into Los Angeles to buy his own magstripe encoder, Chris knew. Max had decided to stop sharing his most valuable data.

Max had become privy to one of the biggest security blunders in banking history, one that most consumers would never hear about, even as it enriched carders to the tune of millions of dollars.

The midsized Commerce Bank in Kansas City, Missouri, may have been the first to figure out what was going on. In 2003, the bank’s security manager was alarmed to find that customer accounts were being sacked for $10,000 to $20,000 a day from cash machines in Italy—he would come in on a Monday and find his bank had lost $70,000 over the week-