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OPERATION FIREWALL

The police arrested Thomas, and a detective read him his Miranda rights and gave him a form to sign acknowledging he understood them. Thomas scoffed at the idea of a local cop trying to question him. “You don't know who you have here,” he said. He urged the detective to call in the feds; the Secret Service would know who El Mariachi was, and he could give them a case involving Russians and “millions of dollars.”

A Secret Service agent visited him in the county jail but wasn't impressed by Thomas's $30,000-drop business. Then an FBI agent from the Seattle field office showed up. On the second meeting, the agent brought along an assistant U.S. attorney and an offer: The feds couldn't help Thomas with his local case, but when he got out he could go to work for the Northwest Cyber Crime Task Force in Seattle.

It would be an intelligence-gathering mission, an official designation for an FBI operation with no predetermined targets. The bureau would get Thomas a new computer, put him up in a nice apartment, pay all of his expenses, and give him $1,000 a month in spending money. In return, Thomas would gather information on the underground and report it back to the task force.

Thomas hated snitches, but he liked the idea of being paid to observe and comment on the underground with which he'd become obsessed. Intelligence gathering wasn't the same as snitching, he reasoned, and he could use the material he collected to write a book about the carding scene, something he'd been thinking a lot about lately.

He also knew exactly how to gather the information the task force was after.

Thomas was released from jail five months after his arrest. And in April, the FBI gained a new asset in the war on cybercrime: El Mariachi and his brand-new government-funded crime forum, the Grifters.

From his bureau-rented corporate apartment in Seattle, El Mariachi was soon gathering information on his fellow carders, particularly the Eastern Europeans. But though Thomas was working for the FBI, he didn't exactly feel kinship with other government assets, and the VPN an-