Underground carders market. Translation of the book "KingPIN". Chapter 23. "Anglerphish"

Chapter 23 deals with the cunningly elusive (almost like in the movie “Catch Me If You Can”) the criminal who drove the FBI around his finger, while managing to get things done while he was pounding the secret services, but in the end got stung because of a woman, but managed to get out and escape. He also, in the best traditions of Chichikov, used "dead souls" to cash out stolen credit cards.

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Kevin Poulsen, editor of the magazine WIRED, and in his childhood blackhat, the hacker Dark Dante, wrote a book about " one of his acquaintances ."

The book shows the path from a teenager-geek (but at the same time pitching), to a seasoned cyber-pahan, as well as some methods of the work of the special services to catch hackers and carders.

The book translation quest started in the summer in the IT camp for high school students - “ Kingpin: schoolchildren translate a book about hackers ”, then Habrayusers and even a little editorial staff joined the translation.
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Chapter 23. Anglerphish

(thanks for the translation thanks to Find_The_Truth )

Anglerfish

Max was collecting information on Brett Johnson . He began by checking access logs and personal messages from the CardersMarket admin. In order to check himself, Max hacked Johnson's account on the website of the International Association for the Advancement of Criminal Activity (IAACA) and looked for traces of his activity. However, there were no smoking pistols or any other evidence.

Could he really bring the informant to the narrow circle of his new site? The problem is that there is no specific method to determine whether Johnson or someone else works for the government. Max wanted to use the security hole of jurisprudence, like a buffer overflow in BIND, which he could use over and over again for anyone he suspected.

If (is_snitch (Go llumfun)) ban (Go llumfun);

He trusted David Thomas, not realizing that Thomas had already brought Aisman to his kilometer list of enemies.


David Thomas

Somehow, when he checked it, he sent us some PayPal data that was true, but I marked it as illegal. I thought, okay, this guy is not a federal and not running errands for them. It was very important for me, because it depended on it whether I would trust him or not. We took note of this and decided to contact a lawyer to give us a final answer, my friend said that he would take care of it. Although I doubted that we would get a concrete answer, because lawyers like to get paid for all sorts of assumptions, rather than for concrete facts. Maybe I came across bad lawyers.
I would really like to know if I can find something that the cops or snitch can't find. Something that will make their plans fall by 100% if they do this. What a bowl of grail. All this time I live with the expectation that my activity will give them away. Like someone who smokes a joint with someone to make sure he's not a cop. Or as a prostitute who asks her client: “Are you a cop? If you are a cop, you must tell me about it. ”

Of course, Brett Johnson was completely in the mud. However, contrary to suspicions, his return to crime in the post-firewall era did not begin with squealing. It all started with a girl.

Johnson’s crimes and his cocaine habits in nine years drove out his wife. On the way to the door, she broke his MSR206, so he had to look for a psychologist to cope with the loss. Then Johnson met Elizabeth at a North Carolina bar. She was a 24 year old dancer in a local strip bar, and for Johnson she became love at first sight. He burned his savings, giving her gifts: a $ 1,500 wallet, a pair of new shoes for $ 600. After five months, she moved in with him. However, when they made love for their first time, Elizabeth did not allow him to kiss herself.

Johnson's dark guesses were confirmed when he found Elizabeth on the site, where the men shared their opinions about strippers and prostitutes. Line by line, he read about how his girlfriend provides services in exchange for money and cocaine. Johnson presented her with what she found, with which she, with tears in her eyes, promised to engage her in drugs and prostitution.

Hoping to get Elizabeth out of her usual old way of life, Johnson began to shower her with more expensive gifts and take her to expensive restaurants. This was the real reason for his return, he really needed money. Luck, who chose him during Operation Firewall, turned away from him on February 8, 2005, when the Charleston police in North Carolina arrested him for using Bank of America counterfeit checks when buying Krugerrand (gold coins in South Africa) and hours won on eBay, who were awaiting cash on delivery at his hut. After a week in the Charleston District Detention Center, longing for Elizabeth, Johnson knocked out a date. After he convinced them that he was a Gollumfun, the admin who fled when the cops covered ShadowCrew, they agreed to help him if he worked for them.

The Secret Service lowered the bail for Johnson to $ 10,000. When he was released, agents transferred him from Charleston to Columbia, South Carolina, where they rented him accommodation and paid him $ 50 a day. Now he was a daily visitor to the field office in Colombia, starting at 4 pm and working until nine, devoting the Secret Service to the depths of CardersMarket and other forums. Everything that happened on Johnson’s monitor was duplicated on a 42-inch plasma that hung on the office wall. They called it Operation Anglerphish, and Johnson thought that one day this would make a great book. That's why he registered the domain Anglerphish.com and began negotiations with a New York Times journalist. When Manus Day hacked into his box and provided information about his online activity, the agents of the Secret Service were angry. They responded quickly, blocking access to computers outside the office and ordering them to break contact with the journalist. Elizabeth threw him - her name and occupation were exposed as a violation.

Then Eisman deprived him of his privileged position at CardersMarket, and the scammers whom he had known since the Counterfeit Library began refusing to do business with him. Johnson was getting out of trust, and the Secret Service was running out of patience.

At the end of March 2006, agents decided to act using only one of the catches of the operation - a fraudster from California, who stole at least $ 200,000 through frauds with tax returns. Johnson as an expert in this field, talked to a rogue online, and the Secret Service tracked their chat in the C & C Internet cafe in Hollywood. At this time in Los Angeles, an agent came to a cafe and sat down in two tables from a man who filled out his fake declarations.

When local police and Secret Service agents searched the apartment of a Hollywood suspect, they discovered that everything had been cleaned up: no computers, no other evidence. The suspect just did not repaint the walls and did not clean the carpet. Johnson's employers in Colombia already suspected that information about their informant became known after what happened on CardersMarket. Now they had every reason to believe that he had warned the target about an impending search.

They decided to check Johnson on a lie detector. The polygraph line remained motionless when Johnson was asked two questions: “Did you contact the suspect?” “Did anyone else communicate with the suspect?” Johnson answered: “No”. "Not". The last question was more detailed: “Did you have any unauthorized contact with anyone?” Johnson answered again: “No,” but his skin reacted with a sharp jump in the diagram. Despite the bans of agents, Johnson continued to talk with a correspondent from the New York Times, he confirmed that he was seriously going to start writing a book. The feds interrogated him until two at night, and then gave him a signature paper with an agreement to search his apartment rented by the agency.

A search of the apartment was similar to the search for "Easter eggs". The agents found a working credit card in the bedroom closet. Notebook, hidden in the closet, in which credit card numbers, PIN codes and customer data were stored. Sixty-three credit cards were hidden in a sock, which Johnson tucked into one of the shoes. The breakfast box, hidden at the bottom of the laundry basket, kept two thousand dollars in cash fresh. Finally, Kinko payment cards were also stored there, with which Johnson paid for using a computer in a local copy shop.

He led a triple life from the very beginning of the recruitment agency, exposing himself a fraud in the Colombian office, continuing to lead his life in the remaining time. Johnson's specialty was the very fraud that was the purpose of a raid in Los Angeles. He used social security numbers from online databases, including the death rate for recently deceased citizens in California, then filled out tax returns on their names and received refunds on a pre-created card that he could cash out at any ATM. In these frauds under forty-one names, he raised more than 130,000 dollars, and all this under the nose of the Secret Service.

Agents phoned Johnson's sponsor and persuaded him to withdraw a $ 10,000 bail, which freed Johnson from custody. Then the agents again placed Johnson in the county jail. Three days later, Johnson came to his employer with a junior agent who was not happy with the informant. “Before we start, Brett, I just want to say that either you tell us everything you have done over the past six years, or I will do everything to fuck you and your whole family,” the agent growled. “And I'm not just talking about the current situation. As soon as you leave, I will pursue you and your family until the end of your days. ”Johnson refused to cooperate, so the agents had no choice but to start preparing the charge. The US Attorney's office began working on a federal conviction. However, the fraudster had another ace up his sleeve. Two weeks later, he managed to recover the bail, left the SIZO and successfully escaped.

Operation Anglerphish was a fiasco. After 1,500 hours of work, the government was left with a runaway informant and tens of thousands of dollars in a new scam. There was only one ray of hope: the first batch of twenty-nine dumps of Johnson, bought by him in May for six hundred dollars. The Secret Service tracked down several credit cards at a Vancouver pizzeria, but it was a dead end. However, the Bank of America corporate account, which was used for payment, belonged to a 21-year-old John Gianoni , who lives in Rockville Center on Long Island.

To be continued