Armchair Safari (A Cybercrime Technothriller)

by Jonathan Paul Isaacs

  Anton cleared his throat after a moment. “Let me understand. You borrowed fifteen thousand euros to gamble on the Internet? That’s your master plan?”

  “Oh, no—not at all. Like I said, it’s a code phrase.”

  “Please explain,” said Anton gruffly.

  “The trick with credit card numbers is to not tip off anyone that they’re at risk. Keep the owner from canceling the card. If the hacker isn’t careful and leaves signs that there was a data breach, the merchant probably contacts the credit card carrier and the carrier reissues a bunch of cards. In that case it’s a race against time to use the cards before they get turned off. Or, say the hacker is careful, but then runs up an astronomical bill buying electronics. Even if the hacker moves onto the next account number when the first card gets shut off, the authorities will already be working backward to hunt him down and arrest him. Do you understand so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “But let’s say instead of obvious, fraudulent charges, there’s a small charge to some online storefront that doesn’t stand out from all the grocery bills and shopping trips. Maybe five, ten euros. The card owner probably won’t catch it in that first monthly statement. Or the next. Or the next one after that. I mean, how often do you really inspect your own credit card statements, Anton?”

  “I pay cash for everything.” I’m a criminal, you idiot.

  Krystian sat open-mouthed, horrified at the thought.

  Anton shook his head.

  “Look,” Anton said, feeling both tired and disappointed. “I think I get what you’re describing. You bought a bunch of credit card numbers from someone else so that your fingers are clean. You now want to farm money from each of those cards so that you can get cash without triggering any alarms, cause the cards to be canceled, or lead the authorities to you. Right?”

  The kid’s eyes narrowed. “That was very... concise.”

  “Okay. So—why poker? A little gambling on the side is fine, but let me give you some advice. Don’t put yourself in a position where you might not be able to repay Yuri. That would be very, very bad for you. It would be better to just launder those little charges somewhere and pool them together. You need to establish a regular way to get cash into your pocket so that you can repay your loan. Just don’t... expose yourself.”

  Krystian regarded him strangely. It made Anton uncomfortable, and he wasn’t used to being uncomfortable.

  “You know, you had me fooled, Anton,” Krystian replied finally. His arrogance was again on full display as he rocked back and forth in his office chair. “What you just described is exactly the plan. You’re smarter than you look.”

  The urge to punch this kid was almost overwhelming.

  Krystian apparently mistook the darkening in Anton’s face as a signal for more exposition. “I already told you. I’m not gambling with the money. Online Poker is just a code phrase.”

  He needs a guiding hand, The Boss had told Anton. Patience, Anton.

  Fuck.

  “Tell me, exactly, what you’re intending to do with all of these little withdrawals?”

  A smug little smile started crawling over the hacker’s face. He waved Anton over to his battery of computer monitors. “Come here, Anton. I’ll show you exactly what I’m going to do. It’s going to make us rich.”

  10

  It was night. Krystian’s apartment was dark except for the lone table lamp that illuminated his computer desk. The windows were open, allowing the still-frigid air of early spring to invade the bedroom and cool the hot exhaust from the multiple workstations around Krystian’s work desk. Krystian liked things cold; he had always felt that a sharp stab of chilled air gave him a mental edge. And tonight, he was sure he needed it.

  One of the chat windows open on Krystian’s monitor blinked with a response.

  He had been very selective about whom he had approached for help. This was going to be delicate work, after all. The last thing that Krystian could allow would be for anyone to recognize a pattern of illicit activity with the credit card numbers. Everything had to be subtle. If Krystian could pull that off then, well, this little scheme could go on indefinitely. He would be a billionaire.

  DarkZeus357 was typing. Krystian smiled. He had scammed a couple times with DarkZeus in the past and it had been awesome. They had a couple denial of service attacks under their belts together, one of which was against the online site of the German newspaper Der Spiegel for their stance on stronger internet controls in the European Union. They had also run a few identity theft scams. It was fun to net bucks off the occasional gullible pensioner looking for better returns on their savings. A crappy stock market and a high unemployment rate made for a great environment for a certain type of mark being parted from their money.

  But the most hopeful thing that got Krystian excited about DarkZeus had nothing to do with their past exploits. It was the fact that he was a fellow online gamer.

  I’m here, said the chat window. What up?

  “So, are you interested in making a little cash?” said Krystian aloud as he typed into the newest chat session. He had a habit of narrating to himself when he did instant messaging, to make it more conversational.

  The reply from DarkZeus357 cam almost immediately. Well, duh. What r u thinking?

  “You told me you like Armchair Safari, right? The online game. Do you still play?”

  DarkZeus357: You know I do. Fucking awesome.

  Krystian smiled. Computer games had always been a passion of his, especially role playing games. He loved the ability to immerse himself in fantasy worlds where his alternate persona had the ability to be a god, to unleash his power and dominate the lesser beings around him. When RPGs started moving onto the Internet, an entirely new dimension began to open up: one where he could compete against and defeat real people instead of just computer-generated monsters or obstacles. The problem was that most of these games encouraged cooperation, not competition. Players were supposed to band together and defeat computer-generated obstacles as a team. Team up and kill the dragon. Been there. Team up and steal the treasure. Done that. Krystian thought that the whole of it quickly became excessively boring. And then along came Armchair Safari. Safari was a game that celebrated players competing against each other as the core thrust of the game. There was no struggle better than pitting your own wits against another live human being, and no bigger sense of power and accomplishment as when you won convincingly and completely.

  Krystian had craved to be elite, admired, and perfect ever since those preteen years when everyone around him would make fun of his awkwardness. He had never been able to find superior—or even level—footing in the real world. But he excelled at dominating in the virtual world of online gaming. Now, through Armchair Safari, he at last could bring the two together on a scale that would cement himself a legacy forever.

  “Excellent,” continued Krystian as he typed into the chat window. “How many hours per week are you putting in right now?”

  Playing? I don’t know, maybe thirty. Gotta still have time to work and pay the bills, replied DarkZeus.

  Only thirty hours to adventure? What a shame, thought Krystian, without a hint of sarcasm.

  “Have you been having much success?” Krystian typed.

  There was a pause. Some. It’s been hard to keep my experience level up lately. I keep getting killed.

  “Okay,” typed Krystian. “I have a plan to turn those tables around for both you and me, then. We’re going to do a little focused player killing.”

  That’s what you do when you turn the game ON. What’s so special about that?

  Krystian smiled. “It’s special because we’re going to kill our own players.”

  There was a long, long pause. Then a question mark appeared in the chat window. DarkZeus clearly didn’t understand. Krystian chuckled at his brilliance.

  “Here is what I need you to do. I will give you a batch of two hundred credit card numbers per week. I want you to create two hundred new player ac
counts with 9.99 euros each for the entry fee. Then have one player character slaughter the rest to collect their money.”

  There was another pause. Then: Where did the credit card numbers come from?

  “Where do you think?”

  The chat window was still for a full minute.

  Okay. That’s cool, just asking, DarkZeus typed at last. Why not just use the credit cards to buy stuff?

  “I want cash, not stuff.”

  Then why do we have to create accounts at such a small amount? Couldn’t you just withdraw a big chunk?

  “Because,” Krystian typed, “we’re going to do it again, and again, and again. It will help keep it from being noticed. Pull out a big chunk and you get to do it once before the card holder notices and has it turned off. Plus, if you do big chunks a bunch of times across multiple cards, someone might clue in about a pattern and start looking for us. Sooner or later, we get caught. But with this way that I’m describing, it’s such a nit that people probably won’t notice for a long time.”

  Another full minute went by before the next reply. When DarkZeus did type something, it was a simple smiley face icon.

  “Are you in?”

  Yeah, I’m in. Creating that many characters is a lot of work. What if they spawn all over the map? It will be hard to kill that many with all the travel, even in a week.

  “Don’t worry, I have that part handled. I have a way to make the new accounts cluster all together. The characters and the strongholds will all be tucked away in a nice little corner I found. You just need to fill out the forms and do the data entry each week with a new credit card draw.”

  DarkZeus357: A nice little corner, huh? Lol. You been hacking again?

  “Just a little,” replied Krystian, adding his own smiley face.

  What’s our split?

  “You keep ten percent.” Krystian thought that was a deal that would get DarkZeus’s attention. In a country where most people pocketed only 350 euros or less each month after taxes, he was offering an opportunity that pushed almost twice that amount. As a side job, no less.

  The longest pause yet.

  Krystian started getting tense and shifted in his seat as the clock ticked on.

  “Hello?” he typed finally.

  WTF, you stingy bastard? I’m doing all the work and you keep all the money? I want 50/50.

  Krystian leaned back in his chair. This was the part of the negotiation that made him most nervous. There were only a few people he felt comfortable about approaching to do this work, with reasonable confidence that they would stick to his plan and not fuck everything up by taking a couple credit cards and going on some giant shopping spree by themselves. Krystian had known DarkZeus357 for a while, and he really wanted him to participate. He decided to level with him. “No. I need to pay back my investors who financed getting the card numbers. It’s not like I am keeping all the rest myself. Ten percent is a fair cut.”

  The chat window sat idle. Krystian started to regret his openness. “If you don’t like it, it’s not like I can’t just get someone else to go do the work,” he lied.

  More waiting. Krystian popped open a web browser and started scanning porn.

  DarkZeus357: What split are your investors expecting?

  Did Krystian even want to answer that question? His first impulse was no, but again, this was DarkZeus.

  “They get eighty percent. So that leaves me with ten and you with ten. See? Fair.”

  After about half a minute, the chat window pinged again. Do they know how much you’re going to make each week?

  “Yeah. I have a, uh... handler. They’re expecting a certain amount. We’ve already sort of worked out what the limit is that a single person can do in a given amount of time—that’s where the two hundred comes from.”

  What if we wrote a bot to do more? We could keep the extra.

  “A bot won’t work. Armchair Safari uses CAPTCHAs when you login.”

  A CAPTCHA, an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, was a program that was meant to keep bots or other automated programs from illegitimately completing registration forms, shopping carts, or other transaction-related tasks. CAPTCHAs ensured that a human being was involved by generating a picture of distorted text on a data entry form that a human being could read but a computer program could not. The human user would then type the letters into a text box to proceed further with the process.

  I can get around that.

  Krystian raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

  Really. Just automate everything but the CAPTCHA with a bot. Like you said, we’re just going to kill these characters, right? We can write a bot to do all of that, and just monitor when we need to type in the CAPTCHA challenge.

  “You can do that?”

  DarkZeus357: Pr1mal_Scream can. He’s written lots of bots. He can help get it done. Sure.

  Krystian thought hard for a few moments. He wasn’t sure if this was cheating Yuri or not. After all, as it was explained to him early on, when someone provides the money, they also call the shots. But at the same time, there was an expectation that had been set. What if they were able to exceed that expectation and not have to tell anyone? Krystian had already shown Anton how much work was realistic for a person to do in a given week. And the gun that Anton had waved under Krystian’s nose ensured that more people would not be added to the pool of helpers unless specifically authorized by Anton.

  About 20,000 euros per month for gross proceeds. That was Anton’s expectation.

  Could they make it thirty with a little automation, and keep the extra themselves? Could they make it fifty?

  As if sensing the need for a nudge, DarkZeus357 typed: If you let us run a routine to do all the grunt work, we sure can make a lot more cash together. Plus, instead of just farming players, we might actually have some time left over to go adventure in the game.

  Krystian sat up a little straighter from his hunched-over thinking position. “That’s a great point. We wouldn’t just have to be a money making slave machine.”

  With no time left over for fun.

  “Right.” Krystian thought some more.

  “And...”

  What?

  Krystian smiled. “AND...”

  What?

  “If we keep a lot of that extra money in the game, in our account, we could have one awesome, nuclear-fueled player character.”

  One?

  “Well, we, uh, yeah. I need the money to all be in one account.”

  Okay, we can start there, but that might have to change. And we need to include Pr1mal_Scream.

  “If he writes the bot, he can be included, too.”

  LOL. I’m ready to go adventuring right now!

  “Can you imagine how powerful our character would be with tens of thousands of euros behind him?”

  Or hundreds of thousands.

  Krystian stared at that word in the chat window. Hundreds of thousands of euros, for them. For him.

  “Okay, let’s do this,” typed Krystian at last. “Get Pr1mal to write the bot and we’ll try it. Anything above the amount I have to deliver to my backers, we’ll split evenly between you, me, and Pr1mal. Is that a deal?”

  DarkZeus357: Deal.

  “Great. I’ll email you the instructions on how to get set up, and send you the card numbers once you’re ready. So—be ready by tomorrow. Okay?”

  Perfect.

  “See you later.”

  CU l8r.

  On one of his computer monitors, Krystian pulled up a spreadsheet—he had to move it to not cover up the browser with a particularly awesome image of two girls enthusiastically making out with each other—and started adjusting his math. He typed in new numbers and played around with a number of different variables to anticipate how many additional characters they would be able to create if they automated everything except the CAPTCHA. When he came up with the final number, Krystian just leaned back in his chair and stared.

  In theor
y, they could get up in the neighborhood of almost 450,000 euros per month. That was 150,000 per month for his own pocket.

  Holy shit.

  A broad, selfish smile started creeping across Krystian’s face. He noticed for the first time since much earlier that evening how cold it was in his apartment. Even so, he was sweating.

  He was going to be rich.

  Krystian gazed for a long time at the spreadsheet, occasionally adjusting a number here and there to play with his pretend millions. He kept glancing at the browser that had the picture of the girls. A warm flush spread through his body despite the cold and he had trouble staying focused. After a few moments he gave in and reached his hand down into his pants, staring longingly at the two girls and how they had their hands all over each other.

  Someday, someday soon, he was going to be sandwiched in between those bitches, and they were going to be doing that to him. He was going to be a god by the time all this was over.

  11

  Austin, Texas.

  Lucy glanced at her watch as she washed her hands in the women’s restroom. It was really late and it seemed like she was never going to get out of the office. She sighed and looked in the mirror, studying the face looking back at her. She was tired. Her mouth was set in a frown. Her eyes looked dull and even her hair seemed flat.

  This is what you asked for, she thought to herself. An important job at an important company. A chance to be somebody and not just a cast-off loser with no future. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?

  Maybe, but the hours sucked.

  Her old life seemed like ages ago, when she had lived in a trailer with her mother and ran around with motorcycle gangs. The Southern California slacker, high-school dropout and biker bitch who would go around drinking, partying, getting high. Riding up and down the 101 sitting on the back of Billy’s bike, a Harley Fat Boy with custom long pipes that made it thunder like a giant vibrator. Hanging out on the beach and smelling the salt air that rolled in from the Pacific. It was a great, carefree way to go about living. And when she got home, if Mom wasn’t already passed out from too much vodka, Lucy would sit with her and they’d drink together.