📸 Photo

KINGPIN

a mysterious domain name, Anglerphish.com—perhaps in preparation for starting his own site.

There was nothing to suggest that Johnson was snitching, though, and neither Max nor Chris had been particularly alarmed by the info dump. Thomas, on the other hand, was now convinced the Shadowcrew founder was an informant. After all, Johnson had announced his retirement before Operation Firewall and then reappeared afterward with no real explanation.

The last thing Chris and Max needed on their emerging site was a shootout between two old-school carders with a Shadowcrew-era grudge. Still possessed by an entrepreneurial pride, Chris wanted the site to be the best crime forum possible. So he reached out to Thomas by ICQ to try to head off trouble.

“I’m not going to entertain any drama about Gollumfun, or others, who is a rat who isn’t a rat,” Chris wrote. “I just want a clean nice board so we can have a safe place to play.”

Chris promised he’d give Johnson the same message: Play nice. It was Conflict Resolution 101. He followed the paternalistic lecture by asking Thomas’s advice on running a successful forum—showing the elder carder respect for his years of experience. But to make sure his admonition was taken seriously, Chris added a warning. “We are not kids dude,” he wrote. “We are very old school. And we are very good at what we do.”

Thomas promised to behave, adding that he’d do his best to help make Carders Market the drama-free forum everyone wanted. But secretly, a hard pit of suspicion was forming in his gut. Why would anybody defend Brett Johnson, who was so obviously a snitch?

He noticed that Easylivin’ was using an old version of ICQ that leaked an Internet IP address. Thomas tried to trace the address and wound up in Boston, a known hotbed of federal informants. Carders Market’s hosting was based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, another perfect place to run an undercover operation. And the phone number on the domain name listing