14 DAY TRIAL // The DarkMarket.ws forum, a well known home for credit card fraudsters and skimmers has been under the control of the FBI since 2006. The sting operation has been revealed by reporter Kai Laufen from the Südwestrundfunk (SWR) German radio station. According to several documents leaked from the German national police, the FBI informed them about the intelligence gathering operation in 2006, during a joint effort to apprehend a DarkMarket forum member residing in Germany.
The DarkMarket English-only forum was used by cyber criminals from all over the world to conduct illegal business. This ranged from exchanging technical information and techniques to selling various “goods” like credit card skimming equipment, software tools, stolen IDs or banking details. The website administrators decided to willingly shut it down earlier this month.
According to the Südwestrundfunk report, FBI Senior Agent J. Keith Mularski from the Cyber Initiative and Resource Fusion Unit at the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance (NCFTA) in Pittsburgh has been one of the Web site's administrators since 2006 and used the 'Master Splynter' nickname. "Currently, the FBI has been successful in penetrating the inner 'family' of the carding forum, DarkMarket," is noted in a memo sent by the FBI in 2006 to the German national police, while Mularski wrote in an e-mail dating March 2007 that "Master Splynter is me".
Threat Level reports that another former DarkMarket admin, going by the handle “Lord Cyric” confirmed that Master Splynter had been invited to join the forum's administration team around two years ago. He also added that, at the time, Master Splynter was known in the underground as a spammer. The Spamhaus project listed an Eastern European by the name of Pavel Kaminski as the real person behind the “Master Splynter” handler in 2005. Kevin Poulsen of Threat Level speculates that the FBI might have picked up this online identity, after the real “Master Splynter” went inactive, in order to get a head start in the underground community.
The website allegedly shut down because it was attracting too much attention from international law enforcement agencies due to recent incidents concerning another DarkMarket administrator, known as Cha0. Cha0, identified by the Turkish police as Cagatay Evyapan, has been recently arrested for kidnapping and torturing a police informant. Cha0 used to market and sell high quality ATM skimming devices on the forum.
"It is apparent that this forum … is attracting too much attention from a lot of the world services (agents of FBI, SS, and Interpol). I guess it was only time before this would happen. It is very unfortunate that we have come to this situation, because ... we have established DM as the premier English speaking forum for conducting business. Such is life. When you are on top, people try to bring you down," wrote Agent Mularski as Master Splynter on the board before being shut down.
This might be a cover-up in order to avoid suspicions from the forum members against whom incriminating evidence has been gathered over the recent two years. The FBI might have decided that it is time to put this information to use and go after some of the cyber criminals that frequented the Web site.