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KINGPIN

Their second recruit was Brett Shannon Johnson, thirty-five, a Charleston, South Carolina, identity thief famous online as "Gollumfun," a founder of both Counterfeit Library and Shadowcrew who’d retired from the latter site before the Secret Service swept in.

After vanishing from the scene for over a year, Johnson was crawling out of retirement—Chris’s sidekick John Giannone had spotted him on-line that spring and struck up a conversation on ICQ, bringing him up to date on the latest busts and gossip.

Giannone wound up selling Johnson twenty-nine of Max’s dumps for an easy six hundred bucks, then introduced him to Max, who sold him another five hundred cards. "I can see that you and I are going to be doing some good business in the future," Johnson had told Max.

Johnson accepted Max’s and Chris’s invitation to become an admin on Carders Market, lending the site the experience and contacts of the only Shadowcrew administrator to survive Operation Firewall.

Giannone joined Carders Market as "Zebra," and Max created a second, secret identity for himself, "Digits." The alternate handle was a keystone in Max’s new business strategy. Shadowcrew had fallen because prosecutors proved that the founders were themselves buying, selling, and using stolen data—running an informational website wasn’t, in and of itself, illegal, Max reasoned. So Iceman would be the public face of Carders Market but would never buy or sell stolen data. Digits, his alter ego, would handle that, vending the dumps Max was siphoning from the Vancouver pizza joint to anyone who could afford them.

To complete his vision for the site, Max needed one more admin, with a particular qualification: a command of the Russian language. He wanted to repair the rift that Operation Firewall had torn between Eastern European carders and their Western counterparts. Two Russian Shadowcrew members had fallen into Cumbajohnny’s VPN trap, and the whole affair had left the Russians deeply suspicious of English-speaking forums.