MOSCOW, 2008
THE BANK BUILDING ON TVERSKAYA STREET
— Good afternoon. Young man, how can I help you?
— Good afternoon, I would like to cash some money. A week ago my friend from the USA has made a wire transfer into my name. I hope it’s arrived already.
— Let’s take a look. Your documents, please?
— Here you are.
The clerk girl took my passport and started to check the database in the computer. A few minutes has passed and she got this surprised look on her face.
— Sergey Andreyevich, could you come here for a moment?
— What happened, Svetlana?
— We have a transfer for the young man here who is trying to open an account in our bank.
— So, what’s the problem?
— The amount, Sergey Andreevich
The manager took one look at the monitor and his eyes also became the size of quarters. He took my passport in his hands, kept checking the data for some time and even checked whether the document was fake:
— Smirnov Gennadiy Stepanovich, I’m happy to greet you in our bank. Allow me to offer you some coffee or tea?
— No, thanks, I’m in a hurry. — Gennadiy already had an approximate understanding about the sum of the transfer, so he wasn’t really surprised by the dumbfounded looks of the clerk and the branch manager. — Would you cash the whole amount, please?
— I’d love to, but we’re going to need time for that, — the manager lingered, thinking that there is basically enough money in the safe, but they would definitely have to close the branch for the day.
— Okay. One percent from the amount will be yours if I won’t notice this time.
— The manager made a frantic gulp and quickly rushed to the inner sanctum. Not even twenty minutes have passed, as he came out with a briefcase.
— Gennadiy Stepanovich, here is your money, you can come into my office and count everything.
— Thanks. I trust you. — The young man opened the briefcase and gave a couple of banknote stacks to the manager. — Cheers.
After the bank, Gennadiy headed straight for the “Zhiguli” with tinted windows, parked on the other side of the street. In the car he handed the briefcase to a guy in the backseat.
— Take your twenty percent right away, — said he.
— Okay, but can I ask you where you get this kind of money from? — Gennadiy pulled a few stacks out of the briefcase.
— Of course, it’s all very simple. I’m your regular financial partisan. And this money is from our kind American comrades who care about the growth of our economy. Does the word “carder” mean anything to you?
— No, — said Gennadiy
— Well, don’t ask then. Thanks for your work, you may go.
— Gennadiy exited the car and, with a smile, headed home. Peacefully resting in his backpack was more than sixty thousand bucks, so he was in an excellent mood. In a week, he had a rather rude visit from the police and Interpol.
MOSCOW, 2004
The 90’s were over, the mayhem was over, they stopped shooting even in St. Petersburg. Russia was regaining its health, thunderously crashing into the world economy. There were more tycoons than there were mushrooms after the rain. Those who already had the opportunity to use their brains (and, sometimes, pistols) were reaping what they sowed. We finally had a strong and charismatic leader, the Czar and father figure whom the people could trust. Everything was slowly getting back to normal. Pelevin’s “Generation Next” has quieted down, some were quieted down and everyone took their spots by the feeders.
Though, a new generation has grown up: children of the 90’s who have seen and eaten the real stone soup, who have went through the poverty with their parents-on-a-budget, now they were the ones who had to be checked for toughness.
They have come of age, but were too late for the property exchange. They are the ones who go to work as waiters, bartenders and they feel the taste of money, big money for them. Having earned $80-100 a day on tips they feel like they are kings, but they understand that those who have left those tips have way more. The young generation sees how the older ones party, what kind of women surround these unattractive people and they want to be the same. But how? I got into the Internet pretty early, so by 2004 I felt there like a fish in the water. Then, only knowing HTML, I was easily creating pages and sites, gaining respect from those who have discovered the worldwide web much later.
I was sitting in chatrooms and online-games for days. It’s like a drug, much stronger than heroin, but, thankfully, much cheaper.
Having abandoned work, I spent all of my time by the computer.
Two-three days without sleep became the norm because it’s so cool – to always know what’s going on, even if it is only in the virtual world.
But in a month, the first reality call rang – I had to pay rent and I had nothing to pay it with. Four hundred bucks wasn’t much, but where do I get them? I have completely given up my bartender job, there was no way back, I don’t really know any other ways to get dough. Although…
I remember, while searching for some information I needed in the depths of the Internet, I saw something about earning money on the Web. I sit by the computer day and night anyway, may as well get some use out of it. Having put “earning money online” in the search engine, I went link surfing. Every site I visited offered me to follow links onto specific sites and hang out there for 60 seconds. Every link followed – up to 20 cents. As soon as you get 50 dollars, you get a check sent out to your name. How simple, I thought, following my first links. I had to spend time on ridiculous websites with ads on how to increase your penis or breast size. And these ones were just flowers. There was worse too. Only now I noticed that the pay for one link followed wasn’t one-fifth of a dollar. It was one-fifth of a penny. Having counted how much time I am going to waste to earn just 50 lousy bucks, I dropped this thing. And it was a good thing too. Turned out that in the financial section of the contract, it was written in fine print: no checks are currently being sent to the CIS countries. I continued my search. I gained respect for the guys that created the search engine, the robot. In the end of the 90’s, when the Internet was only gaining popularity in Russia, you had to remember or write down the majority of site names. We would write down the sites how they sounded in Russian and wrote them with Latin letters with Russian domains. If I needed to talk to somebody, I would type in chat.ru in the address prompt, and so on. Other sites we would come to know through the ones we already knew, thanks to primitive advertisements.
After half an hour of searching in Google, I found what I was looking for.
Forum xakepy.ru
All kinds of hackers and carders would gather here (as if I knew who they were back then). From certain messages I understood that people here make money, maybe if in not very legal ways. Hackers would sell their programs for data gathering as well as offer their services to cause all kinds of trouble. Carders were the opposite, they kept always buying something. All over the place were scattered classifieds that I didn’t understand: will buy cardboard, will wash and cash dirt, need drops, will buy a stick, etc. I decided to study the newbie section first, where I was hoping to find at least some answers to my questions.
And I wasn’t wrong, at least many abbreviations now made sense. For example, “cardboard” (aka “cc”) – is a credit card, a “drop” is a front man in whose name money transfer is made or merchandise is sent. The “stick” turned out to be the international payment system Paypal, and to “buy a stick” meant to acquire hacked user accounts. The virtual world of financial machinations has become a bit clearer and I dashed to study how payment systems worked in practice.
The first payment system in my way was Webmoney. To hack it, as the salty sea-dogs claimed, was unreal. It’s rumored that the creators of WM (Webmoney) once opened an online wallet in their system and put one million dollars on it. They have spread the information and declared that the one who will be able to hack the wallet, can keep the money, nobody will report anything to the police. Hackers throughout the world have darted to climb the financial Everest, but in the end money remained untouched. Whether it is a rumor of truth, but to this day Webmoney was considered the safest system, plus all the transfer information was hidden from all tax and revenue services and it was anonymous (that is, back then it was like that. Now, as different sources say, WM leaks all the info to the government at their first request), which gave us the possibility to conduct deals on any scale. Therefore, I had to start with that particular financial instrument; otherwise you are not going to make anything in the world of carding and hacking.
After another sleepless night was over, I had a cup of coffee and ran to look for a store where they sell web-money cards. I decided to spend my last money on the Web. It turned out I didn’t have much, only 30 dollars, but, at least, it should be enough for 5-6 “cardboards”, meaning stolen credit cards. I decided to start with the simplest thing, with a punch-in. What’s a punch-in you’re going to ask? I buy electronic copies of credit cards, and with their help I pay for necessary merchandise in European and American Internet shops. Then you can sell the merchandise for real money. I’ll bring up an example. For instance, you are playing an international online game that happens to require payment. Actually, at first it is as though it is free, but, in a couple of weeks, if you wish to continue playing, you will need to pay. In order to do that, there are special extension cards that you can buy in many European Internet shops. By the way, an Internet shop is basically an online store. So, I type in the shop’s website address and buy virtual cards to pay for my game time with a stolen credit card. Usually they are not too expensive, maybe 30-40 bucks. Then I go to a Runet auction, which is an online-auction in a Russian segment of the Internet and sell them for web-money, which I can then quietly exchange for sweet darling rubles. It’s all very simple and pretty fast. Russian users did not know how to use credit cards online yet and even paying for stuff on Runet was fairly rare. Therefore everyone would walk to the closest kiosk where they would get a pre-paid web-money card, so that they could pay for merchandise online with its help. And I would sell them these extension cards, having previously paid for those in a European store with a stolen credit card. That’s it. Well, now that’s it, but back then that was exactly how I decided to start making money.
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