Underground carders market. Translation of the book "KingPIN". Chapter 32. The Mall

Chapter 32 tells you how easy it is to get into the hands of the police, if you are not careful.

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.
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The book quest for book translation began in the summer at ITish camp for high school students - “ Shkvoren: schoolchildren translate a book about hackers, ” then Habrayusers and even a little editorial staff joined the translation.

Chapter 32. The Mall

(for the translation thanks to Shuflin )

Chris drove Tahoe into the garage of the Fashion Island shopping center on Newport Beach, parked and walked out with his new partner, twenty-three year old Guy Shitrid. They went to Bloomingdale with fake American Express credit cards in their wallets.

Shitrid from Israel - handsome, playing the guitar, and the favorite of all the girls, whom Chris met, doing carding. He performed skimming scams in Miami, recruiting professional strippers, supplying them with an incredibly tiny device for copying information from customers' magnetic cards. When the club’s strip managers learned about this, he had to leave the city in a hurry. Shitrid stopped in California, where Chris and picked him up, providing fake documents, rented cars and housing in Archstone. After they went shopping.

Now Chris was close, so close to jump. His wife, Clara, contributed $ 780,000 to eBay in just over three years: 2,609 women's handbags, iPods, Michele watches and Juicy Couture clothing. She had a servant who worked twenty hours a week who was only engaged in delivering things that she didn’t buy for her money. Chris threw money from sales of plastic and new products on the carders market to this - an area unaffected by the picky checks Th3C0rrupted0ne.

He felt that Max did not adhere to that very “Whiz List” plan: to collect a round sum and dump. In the end, he realized that he was not going to leave. He liked hacking, that's all he wanted to do. To hell with him. Chris had his backup plan. He invested profits in the enterprise for Clara, Trendsetter USA, a company that produces stylish jeans, which already had several full-time employees in the bright, pleasant offices of Aliso Viejo. In the end, he was sure that it would be profitable and one hundred percent legal.

Until then he will be busy.

Sheetridus was an avid dandy, and they had already squandered part of the loot on men's clothes for him. This time they were focused. They entered Bloomingdale filled with cool air and ran through the rows with women's handbags, which were located on small shelves along the wall under individual lamps, like museum pieces. Each picked up several samples, and they went to the cashier. After holding the credit cards several times, they went to the door with purses worth $ 13,000 in their hands.

Chris broke his own rules by entering the store with his own hands, because his gang was quickly impoverished. Nancy, who helped build a new safe home for Max, moved to Atlanta, only occasionally withdrawing money. Liz became paranoid, constantly accusing Chris of having thrown her. Her dissatisfaction was based on petty handwritten notes that were added to the amount Chris owed her for every time they appeared in the store: $ 1,918 from a trip to Las Vegas, $ 674 for iPods and GPS systems, $ 525 for 4 purses worth $ 1,750. In the column “Paid to me”, zeros were everywhere. Meanwhile, his recruit - Sarah, shied away from expensive items, although she was still suitable for some assignments. On Valentine's Day, she bought gifts for the girl and wife Chris.

Due to the demand for sales, attempts to start a legitimate business and bring his gang back to life, it seemed to Chris much more reasonable to pay others for the production of plastic. He met Frederick Vigo on UBuyWeRush. Vigo was looking for ways to pay $ 100,000 to the Mexican mafia, after he agreed to this amount for importing a conifer smuggling goods from China, which was intercepted at the border. Chris found a job for him. The fake equipment was moved from the tea house to the Vigo office in Northridge, and one of Chris's accomplices went to him a couple of times a week to pick up a fresh batch of newly made credit cards, paying $ 10 each.

Chris and Guy left Bloomingdale and slowly approached the car. Chris opened the trunk and put the purchases among a dozen plain brown bags from the mall, piling on top of each other. Each was full of wallets, watches and some men's clothing. He closed the trunk and got into the car, thinking about the next place where they could go.

They were still discussing this when a police patrol car drove into the parking lot. Stopping next to them, she left two officers in uniform from the police department of Newport Beach.

The heart went to the heels. Another arrest.

The police took them to the station, which was located further along the road from the shopping center, searched the car, where they found 70 credit cards and a little ecstasy and Xanax. After taking the prints, Chris was escorted to the inquiry room, where Detective Bob Wats read out his rights and gave him to sign.

Chris signed and started the same story that helped him out of serious trouble in San Francisco a few years earlier. He secretly confirmed his name and acknowledged with noticeable annoyance the use of fake cards in Bloomingdale and elsewhere. He told me that it was a whole organization. He worked in real estate collateral and suffered a lot when the real estate market collapsed. Then he was hired to distribute credit cards for a small percentage of the head of the California gang of carders and was only a carrier.

This alignment was familiar to Wats, who more than once caught the small sixes involved in cashing. This explained the unprofessional raid at Bloomigdale, which gathered ladies' handbags for thousands of dollars at a time. The guards of this center did not want to insult visitors, so when suspicious people appeared in the store, they usually called Wats or his partners, who arranged careful checks, stopping cars under the pretext of violating traffic rights to check suspects outside the store. If they were innocent, they could not even suspect that it was the store workers who called the police. The behavior of Shitrid and Chris, however, was so blatant that the store employees had no doubts. The guards called the police directly to prevent these individuals from leaving the parking space.

However, Wats did not buy into the story of Chris Aragon about his plight. He was a detective for only eight months, but the policeman is already seven years old. The first thing he did when they brought in Aragon was to punch him in the base and find out that his illegal activities had begun in the seventies, and, technically, he had been on probation since his last arrest in San Francisco for faking credit cards .

Wats found out that this is the leader who is now sitting in a cell. In a hurry, he secured a search warrant and joined other detectives and police officers who left at the only address found by Chris - Trendsetter USA. One glance at the puzzled faces of the firm’s employees, during the autopsy, showed Wats that they were innocent. After the survey, one of the workers indicated that their boss, Clara, in the main building was in charge of eBay.

Wats opened the vaults and removed the contents: 31 women bags, 12 new Canon PowerShot digital cameras, several TomTom GPS navigators, Palm organizers and iPods, all in sealed boxes.

Clara entered the office in the middle of the search and was immediately arrested. In her purse, Wats found several utility bills at the address on Capistrano beach, all in different names. She reluctantly admitted that she lives there and was very disappointed when Wats said that this was his next stop.

With the keys to Clara's house and a new search warrant, the detectives drove up to the house of Aragon and began searching. In Chris’s home office, they found an open safe in a closet. Inside were two numbered plastic covers with fake cards. The room had more of these cards, bound by rubber bands and hidden in the nightstand. MSR206 was on the shelf in the common room, and in the adjoining garage, next to the simulator, was a box with purses.



In addition to the kitchen and bathrooms, the boys' bedroom remained the only place without evidence. Only two double beds side by side and a few soft animals and toys.

For all Chris’s talk about credit card fraud is a victimless crime, he didn’t take into account the two most vulnerable. They were four and seven years old, and their dad did not return home.

To be continued