October 17, 2008, 6:05 AM — While criminals thought it was based in Eastern Europe, the Internet’s top English-speaking cybercrime forum was secretly run by the FBI from this building on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh. Photo: John Monroe Butler/ Wired.com
Kevin Poulsen reports that DarkMarket.ws, an online community center for thousands of identity thieves, hackers and credit card swindlers, has been secretly run by an FBI cybercrime agent for the last two years, until its voluntary shutdown earlier this month, according to documents unearthed by a German radio network.
Reports from the German national police obtained by a Southwest German public radio station, blew the lid off the long running sting by revealing its role in nabbing a German credit card forger active on DarkMarket. The FBI agent is identified in the documents as J. Keith Mularski, a senior cyber crime agent based at the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance (NCFTA) in Pittsburgh, who ran the site under the hacker handle Master Splynter. Read the rest of this article »
