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UBUYWERUSH

that you update your Citibank ATM/Debit card PIN." Clicking on the link took customers to a perfect simulacrum of a Citibank site, hosted in China, where the victim would be prompted for the data.

Good for direct cash, PINs were the holy grail of carding. And it was CarderPlanet's King Arthur who was most successful in the quest. King, as he was known to his friends, ran an international ring that specialized in hitting Citibank customers, and he was a legend in the carding world. One of King Arthur's lieutenants, an American expat in England, once let it slip to a colleague that King was making $1 million a week from the global operation. And he was just one of many Eastern Europeans running cash-outs in America.

Max plugged himself into the Citibank cash-outs in his own way: He Trojaned an American mule named Tux, and started intercepting the PINs and account numbers the carder was getting from his supplier. After a while, he contacted the source—an anonymous Eastern European whom Max suspected of being King Arthur himself—and told him candidly what he'd done: Tux, he said, had been guilty of the crime of slipshod security. For good measure, Max claimed falsely that the mule had been ripping off the supplier.

The supplier cut off Tux on the spot and began providing Max with his PINs directly, anointing the hacker as his newest cash-out mule.

When the PINs first started rolling in, Max had passed them all to Chris, who tore into them with a vengeance. Chris would pull $2,000 in cash—the daily ATM withdrawal limit—and send his girls out to make in-store debit purchases with the PINs until the account was drained dry. He was raping the cards. Max didn't like it. The whole point of a cash-out was to get cash, not merchandise that sold for a fraction of its worth. With a little finesse, the PINs could be producing a lot more liquid.

Then it occurred to him he didn't need his partner at all for this particular operation.

When he returned from UBuyWeRush with his very own MSR206, Max went into business for himself. He programmed a stack of Visa gift