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CARDERS MARKET

he couldn't just put the Carders Market server on the floor of his safe house—that would make him a sitting duck.

He hacked into a Florida data center run by Affinity Internet and installed a VMware virtual machine on one of its servers—secreting an entire simulated computer on one of its systems. His hidden server grabbed an unused Internet address from Affinity's pool of addresses. The site would be a ghost ship, not officially owned or operated by anyone.

Max played with different Internet forum software and finally settled on the flexible package vBulletin. He spent months customizing the layout and designing his own templates for the look and feel of the site, styling it in shades of gray and muted gold. The work felt satisfying. For the first time in years, he was creating something instead of stealing. It was just like setting up Whitehats.com, except in those ways in which it was the opposite.

Finally, on the one-year anniversary of the Operation Firewall raids, he conjured a new name in his ever-changing lineup of noms de guerre: Iceman. He chose the handle in part for its commonality: There were lots of Icemen in the underground—there'd even been one on Shadowcrew. If law enforcement tried to track him down, they'd find several mirages on their radar.

Max, as Iceman, launched Cardersmarket.com in late 2005 with little fanfare. Chris joined as the first coadministrator, inventing the handle EasyLivin' for the site.

From their careful observation of Shadowcrew and the splinter forums that followed, Max and Chris knew that the key to gaining acceptance was to appoint big names who could help run the board and attract still more heavy hitters from their circle of friends. The partners soon managed to draw two household names from the Shadowcrew diaspora.

Bradley Anderson, a forty-one-year-old Cincinnati bachelor, was their first pick. Anderson was a legend as "ncXVI," a fake-ID expert and author of the self-published book Shedding Skin, the bible of identity reinvention.