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thousands of legitimate hosted sites. El was working to change that, lodging complaints with the company over and over again. The tactic was lacking in logic: If Carders Market really was under government control, the complaints would fall on deaf ears; only if it was a real crime site would Affinity kick it off. If Iceman drowns, then he’s not a witch.

A week after Thomas’s post, Affinity abruptly cut off Carders Market. The shutdown angered Max; he’d had a good thing going at ValueWeb. He searched overseas for new, legitimate hosting that would stand up to El Mariachi, approaching companies in China, Russia, India, and Singapore. It always turned out the same way—they’d demand some upfront money as the price of admission and then roll a spool of red tape in front of the door, asking for a passport and a business license or corporate papers.

“Couldn’t be because you have some STUPID FUCKING NAME called CARDERS this or CARDERS MARKET that, now could it?” Thomas wrote, taunting Iceman. “Maybe if you didn’t scream ‘CARD- ERS WORK HERE,’ you could get a small site going, and possibly grow to be the beast you so desperately need to be.”

It was personal now: Thomas hated Iceman, whether he was a fed or not, and the feeling had become mutual.

Max finally set up at Staminus, a California firm specializing in high- bandwidth hosting resistant to DDoS attacks. By then, Thomas was tear- ing into him in the comments section of a random blog called “Life on the Road.” The blogger had quoted Thomas’s comments about Carders Market in a brief entry about the forums, unwittingly volunteering his blog as the new battlefield in the El Mariachi-versus-Iceman war.

Iceman picked up the gauntlet and posted a lengthy public rebuttal to Thomas’s indictment, accusing his foe of “hypocrisy and slander.”

CM is NOT a “crime board” or an “empire” or any of this bullshit accusation. We are simply a forum that chooses to allow discussion of financial crime. We also lend authority in judging