Chapter 8: The Story of Dex

by Paul Craig as "Dex"

Overview

The dim lights fill the room with a dull, eerie glow, and in the midst of the paperwork-filled chaos sits one man. His eyes riveted to two computer screens simultaneously , a cold emotionless expression fills his tired caffeine -fueled face. Pizza boxes and bacterially active coffee cups litter his New York apartment

His life, though, is not lived in this chaotic physical world. No, his life is hidden, hidden amidst an Internet-based labyrinth that evolves around shady dealings with dodgy contacts, large powerful Italian families, and some of the largest Internet-based scum. These are his colleagues, his friends .

Once a highly paid computer programmer, Paul (known to most as Dex) moved to the underground world when he was laid off three years ago in the dot-com downfall. Since then he has made a living doing almost anything illegal, unethical, or immoral.

He has grown to become a very selfish and unrelenting thief , caring only about profit, gain, and survival. For the last three years he has managed to pay bills by breaking as many laws as possible. It started with selling stolen Intellectual property to the highest bidder, mostly software source code and customer information databases. This soon grew to social security numbers , bank account details, and eventually identities. Once a respectful citizen of society, Dex now feels uncomfortable when asked what he does for a living, a slight glint of remorse now and then for the people he has hurt along the way.

But in this line of work, feeling anything can mean the difference between paying or not paying your rent. Sure, working a legitimate day job in some high profile software company is great to tell your friends about, but he simply makes more being unethical and shady, and money pays his bills ”it is just that simple, ethics can t come into this. If there were one thing that drove Dex more than greed, perhaps it was no one knowing about his greed. In particular with money, some would call him a financial evil genius, a mad digital professor of the accounting world. Because every dollar that is paid to Dex usually comes from a questionable source, he is careful to make sure the money is laundered (cleaned) before it reaches him.

In fact, he has become so good at laundering money that now and then he even launders professionally for others, receiving thousands of dollars at a time. Like out of some Hollywood movie, he transfers the money from country to country, account to account: Netherlands, China, Spain, Vanuatu, Cayman Islands. The money is bought and sold through virtual companies, innocent Web sites selling fake products, transferring money through an ever-changing web. By the end the money has a paper trail so long its origin is unidentifiable to even the most trained eye.

Being in such a profession does not come without risks, though; many of his friends have been caught by the police or FBI, mostly for scamming people out of money, shopping with stolen credit cards, or hacking high-profile banks. However, in this industry the police are not your only threat and are certainly not the most dangerous. Just like in the movies, it is not uncommon for someone simply to vanish . Mafia, organized crime syndicates, online gangs ”you have to know where and how to tread around here. A foot in the wrong place or a word to the wrong person and you might end up wearing lead shoes at the bottom of a lake. A year ago Dex closely escaped sure imprisonment when he electronically broke into a large adult toy store. Using a mixture of exploits and luck he was able steal the entire customer contact list from the company s production database server, including credit card information and full customer contacts and demographics .

He managed to sell the user demographics to a small adult advertising company for 10 cents per name , and sold every user credit card details to a well-known Italian organized crime family known as the Ugolini mob. Making a tidy cash profit (tax free) was good, but why stop there when you can make more? There was still a little more blood left in this stone, Dex had thought.

The next step in his plan was to sign up as a reseller of adult toys for a rival company. They would offer him 15 percent of all sales he drove to their site via a referral HTTP link.

Using a previously hacked SMTP server and some craftily written e-mail spam, he directed every customer of the rival toy store to his reseller link. It s amazing how well- targeted spam works; around 65 percent of all e- mails resulted in a purchase. At 4 a.m. , Dex could be found refreshing his reseller statistics page constantly, watching hundreds and hundreds of dollars a minute from the sale of adult toys.

This was all done in the space of three days from the original hack; the adult toy store had no clue what happened . Until he leaked his exploits to a large news portal, for free this time, mostly for sadistic kicks. A week later the shop was closed, and 10 people lost their jobs as the multimillion dollar adult shop went under due to bad press. Perhaps a little too much bad press, because the FBI and police were soon involved. They didn t take long to figure out that someone (probably the same hacker) had stolen the e-mail contact list and spammed all the users with a rival company s product, and they suspected the hack had come from the rival porn company itself.

Quickly Dex had his referral account balance wired to its destination, a Roger J. Wilco who was based in Spain. Shortly after this, the police gained a search warrant and were given access to the referral details of the alleged hacker/spammer. So sure were the police that Roger J. Wilco, in fact, had been the culprit they released a small press statement saying they were chasing the hacker and were only days from an arrest.

Although the moment the money had arrived in Roger J. Wilco s account, it was spent on five years worth of subscriptions to House El Home , an unknown English-Spanish home decoration Internet magazine. Police never found Roger J Wilco, and were even more baffled why this hacker mastermind had invested almost $6,000 for access to a Spanish house redecoration Web site.

If the measure of a man s existence is a name, an address, or tax identification number, then Dex had an extreme case of Multiple Personality Disorder. Roger Wilco was a result of one of his identities; he has his own bank account and debt card located in sunny Spain, and now with five years worth of access to House El Home .

Dex s gift was with people; it had taken only a few simple letters to a Spanish Bank to open his account. Claming that he was moving to Spain in a few months and needed an account set up beforehand, he had been able to set up a debit card under the name Roger J. Wilco. Debit cards are not very hard to open ; they are the equivalent of a credit card but have no credit, only cash that you transfer into the account. This offers no risk to the bank and they usually are promoted as an ATM card for people who want to travel around as they work globally. Best of all, with no risk to the bank, they require very little identification to obtain.

In this case all you needed was an existing credit card to cover the setup fees and a postal address to send the card to. Dex had simply opened a local PO box in New York (paid for with cash) under the name Roger J. Wilco, and paid for the setup of the debit card with a previously stolen credit card. No questions were asked as to why a different person altogether had paid for the card setup fees; he doubted the bank really cared to be honest, as long as they got their money. After about two weeks, a shiny new El Debit O card had arrived in New York with Roger J. Wilco s name embossed on it. Now, Dex had also decided to try his hand at home decoration, and had set up a virtual company called House El Home, offering access to the latest in Spanish home decoration.

He had another debit card set up for the owner of House El Home (a Simon Welsh), and had used this debit card to register and set up the domain name and web host, using the debit card like a Visa card, just with zero credit so he could use it online anywhere just like a normal credit card. Next, he had registered House El Home with Instant Net Billing, Instant Net Billing offered easy ways to accept online transactions from credit cards.

The deal was simple: Net Billing charges your customers credit cards the amount of the transaction for a product or service you sell, then takes 5 percent of the transaction as a fee and moves the remaining amount of money to your account every month; practically every e-commerce site in the world uses a similar service. A simple two-page Web site was then designed, offering news, tips, and advice on how to obtain that stylish Spanish look, all for only $99.99 a month.

The plot was simple. Six thousand dollars was wired from an Internet marketing company in the Netherlands to a Roger J. Wilco (in Spain) for the referral sales of adult toys. Roger Wilco then used this money to buy a five-year subscription to House El Home, and was billed by Instant Net Billing the amount of $6,000, which showed up on his credit card statement. The amount of $5,700 ($6,000 less the 5% transaction fee) was wired to Simon Welsh by Instant Net Billing at the end of the month to his Spanish bank, who credited the amount to his debit card. Now all Dex had to do was walk down a busy New York street, stopping off at every ATM and withdrawing $1,000 in cash as he went. Unworried about security cameras , he knew the Web site was run clean and he had nothing to worry about. He was just another hard-working individual extracting money from his account. The money was withdrawn from Simon Welsh s Spanish-based debit card and was as clean as a whistle in $20 bills.

For further cleaning of the physical notes, if Dex felt the need, he would walk into a bank and simply change all the $20s he withdrew out of the ATM for $100s, then change the $100s at another bank for $50s; this reduced the chance of the serial numbers being traced. At this point the cash was deposited via a SWIFT international wire transfer into his own personal bank account, this time in his name, located in the Cayman Islands.

Dex kept no money in America if he could help it, like the famous gangster Al Capone, It would be a shame if my downfall was tax evasion, the least of my crimes, he had thought.

In fact, the amount of money the US government knew Dex had was so small that he was eligible for financial support for living expenses and food. This was just enough to cover a growing drug and alcohol habit, but he liked the principle of the money more than the amount.