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KINGPIN

It was a promising response. Mularski talked things over with his supervisor, then applied to headquarters for Group II authority, the lesser of two tiers of undercover engagement available to the FBI but still a step up from his previous “passive observation only” mandate. The new latitude wouldn’t let him participate in crimes, but he would finally be permitted to actively engage with the underground. He named Carders Market, and everyone associated with running the site, as the investigation’s targets.

The approval came quickly. But despite his encouraging words, Iceman proved a slippery target; he kept Mularski at arm’s length, not confiding in him and only chatting through Carders Market’s internal messaging system. The FBI agent had better luck on the other side of the battlefield. He’d been an early member of DarkMarket, and now that he was interactive, the site’s founder, JiLsi, quickly identified Master Splyntr as management material. In early September, Splyntr was appointed as a moderator on the site.

The war was heating up. Despite the lessons of the August incursion, JiLsi couldn’t manage to completely lock down DarkMarket. Iceman began sneaking in regularly and deleting accounts at random, just to mess with JiLsi’s head. When DarkMarket retaliated with a fierce DDoS attack against Carders Market’s Iranian host, Iceman fired back with a DDoS of his own against DarkMarket. Both sites groaned under the weight of the junk packets. Iceman quietly set up service at a U.S. hosting company with the bandwidth to absorb the DDoS packets, cleaning the traffic before channeling it back to his real server over an encrypted VPN.

JiLsi was tearing his hair out, voicing his frustrations to Master Splyntr. Mularski shifted his focus away from Iceman and toward the British cybercrime boss who was starting to treat him like a friend. Tentatively, he suggested that JiLsi consider turning over DarkMarket to someone seasoned in setting up bulletproof hosting. Someone accustomed to running sites that everyone hates. A spammer.

Hey, you know my background, he wrote in a chat. I’m real good at setting up servers. I secure servers all the time. I could set this up for you.