Dark Market

The FBI on Friday boasted that its two-year long undercover operation against users of the crime forum DarkMarket netted 56 arrests worldwide and prevented $70 million in economic losses. Huzzah!

"In today's world of rapidly expanding technology, where cybercrimes are perpetrated instantly from anywhere in the world, law enforcement needs to be flexible and creative in our efforts to target these criminals. By joining forces with our international law enforcement counterparts, we have been, and will continue to be, successful in arresting those individuals and dismantling these forums." Stellar press release!

British police add they've arrested five DarkMarket users in recent days, and 11 since the sting began in late 2006. The other arrests have been in Turkey, Germany and the United States, according to the FBI. DarkMarket allowed buyers and sellers of stolen identities and credit card data to meet and do business in an entrepreneurial, peer-reviewed environment. It had 2,500 users at its peak, according to the FBI. But here's where it gets good...

German radio network on Monday first revealed that DarkMarket had been secretly run by an FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary shutdown earlier this month. The leader of the site, know online as Master Splynter, was in fact FBI cybercrime agent J. Keith Mularski, part of an elite seven-agent cybercrime unit based at the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance in Pittsburgh. He was not, however, a man-sized rat sensei to a group of turtles who were teenaged mutant ninjas. Would the FBI call that a conflict of interest?

DarkMarket members believed the site was operated from Eastern Europe, despite a 2006 warning from uber-hacker Max Ray Butler, known then as Iceman. Butler cracked the site's server and announced that he'd caught Master Splynter logging in from the NCFTA's office on the banks of the Monongahela River. Butler ran a site of his own, and the warning was generally dismissed as inter-forum rivalry, even when Butler was arrested in San Francisco last year on credit card fraud charges, and shipped to Pittsburgh for prosecution. It remains unclear whether Mularski took over the identity of a real cyberscammer, or if Master Splynter was his creation from the start.