A reportage
I do not remember the first fraud.
I remember the first money.
That is strange, because people usually remember events, not banknotes. Faces, places, conversations. In my case it was the other way around. Faces vanished. Places changed. Phone numbers stopped existing. Accounts were closed. Nicks died as quickly as the people who used them.
The money stayed.
Cash has one advantage over memory.
It does not ask where it came from.
Normalisation
The first time I stood in front of an ATM with someone else’s money in my head, I did not feel like a criminal.
That was the worst part.
There was no film score. No nervous looking around. No man in a black car watching me through the glass.
There was an ordinary street.
An ordinary ATM.
An ordinary day.
And a man who had a job to do.
That is how normalisation works.
The first step feels like a border.
The second is only a repeat.
The third becomes routine.
Then you stop asking where the border actually is.
In that world everyone had a function.
Some gathered information.
Some looked for people.
Some persuaded.
Some collected the money.
Some only passed messages.
Highest up were the ones you almost never saw.
They were the most interesting.
Not because they were brilliant.
Because they could make other people do the work for them.
That was the first thing I learned about the criminal side of the internet: the higher you sit in the structure, the less you have to do with your own hands.
At the bottom there were people.
At the top there were processes.
That is how it looked then, although of course nobody used those words.
We did not say “organisational structure”.
We said “a contact”.
Not “an intermediary”.
“A guy”.
Not “an operation”.
“A thing”.
Not “a crime”.
“A job”.
Language as a filter
Language was a filter.
If you change the name of a thing, it becomes easier to stop seeing what it means.
“Stolen money” becomes “cash”.
“A victim” becomes “a client”.
“Fraud” becomes “an op”.
And the person who was deceived stops being a person.
They become a number.
Back then I still did not care who was on the other side.
That was one of the basic rules of the scene.
Not knowing.
The less you know, the less you can say.
The less you can say, the less of a threat you are.
That is how it seemed, at least.
Later I understood that it was only half the truth.
The other half was: the less you know, the easier you are to run.
Layers and trust
The internet quickly showed me that there is no single “dark side”.
There are only layers.
One leads to the next.
Behind a closed channel there is a forum.
Behind the forum, a contact.
Behind the contact, a person.
Behind that person, another person.
And behind them, someone who never appears in the conversation.
In films the darknet is a place.
In reality it was more a relationship between people.
Addresses and technologies were only infrastructure.
The most important element remained trust.
Or rather a substitute for it.
You do not need a real surname.
You only need to know that someone keeps their word.
You do not need a face.
A few successful transactions are enough.
You do not need a history.
Reputation is enough.
It was fascinating.
And absurd at the same time.
People who were afraid of the state, of banks and of monitoring built their own reputation systems.
People who claimed they trusted no one trusted pseudonyms.
People who talked obsessively about anonymity would tell someone on the other side of the screen things they would not tell their family.
Anonymity does not remove the need for trust.
Sometimes it only changes the form.
Online versions of people
Over time I started to know more people.
Or at least their internet versions.
Some were aggressive.
Some were calm.
Some wrote correctly and to the point.
Others looked as if they had spent their whole lives in comment sections.
There were also those who seemed completely ordinary.
They were the hardest to remember.
Because they did not fit the stereotype.
They had jobs.
Families.
Cars.
Credit problems.
A sense of humour.
Ordinary lives.
And in the evening they logged into a place where ordinary life no longer applied.
Some started with money.
Others with curiosity.
Still others with the feeling that they had found a system whose rules were simpler than the rules of the legal world.
In the official world you needed qualifications, experience, documents, a history.
Here it was sometimes enough that someone said:
I know a guy.
That sentence could open more doors than a CV.
The man who executed
For a while I thought I knew my position.
I was the man who executed.
I did not decide.
I did not design.
I did not organise.
I carried it out.
That gave a false sense of safety.
A person standing at the end of the chain can tell themselves they are not responsible for what happens at the beginning.
They do not see the victim.
They do not know their story.
They do not know the person who built the fraud.
They do not know the person who made the most.
They only see their fragment.
The ATM.
The envelope.
The phone.
The meeting.
The cash.
And the end.
The problem was that there was never an end.
Every contact led to the next.
Every cash-out generated another.
Every sum of money had a history.
Even if I did not know it.
I remember one evening.
I was sitting alone.
The phone lay beside me.
I was not waiting for a message.
And yet I checked the screen every few minutes.
That was the moment I understood the relationship had started to work both ways.
Before, I thought I was using the system.
Now the system had started to use me.
It did not have to force me.
It was enough that I knew what was expected of me.
That is how addiction to an environment works.
It does not have to be a substance.
You can become addicted to money.
To risk.
To information.
To the feeling that you know something other people do not.
To the conviction that there is a second reality most people cannot reach.
That last one is especially dangerous.
Because you start to treat your knowledge as an advantage.
And an advantage turns into pride very easily.
At the time I knew people from different levels of that world.
I still remember some of them.
Not their names.
Their behaviour.
Someone always wrote in short sentences.
Someone else disappeared for weeks.
One man never spoke on the phone.
Another always wanted to know too much.
Yet another always knew everything.
That last one was the most dangerous.
Not because he had to be.
Because people who claim they know everything usually start making decisions for others.
The purge
Then the first cracks appeared.
Someone stopped answering.
Someone else suddenly changed their number.
A contact vanished.
An account stopped working.
Someone was arrested.
Information arrived in fragments.
Nobody knew anything.
And at the same time everybody knew something.
That is what panic looks like in a scene built on anonymity.
There is no single piece of information.
There are dozens of versions.
Each one might be true.
Each one might be a lie.
And none of them can be verified.
That was the first time I heard the word: “purge”.
I do not know if it was used seriously.
Maybe someone was only trying to sound threatening.
But the word stayed in my head.
Because suddenly I started looking at contacts differently.
Not as people I knew.
As people who knew something about me.
That is a completely different view.
I went through old messages.
Not to find something.
I simply wanted to see how much information about me might exist in other people’s hands.
It turned out to be more than I had assumed.
Numbers.
First names.
Places.
Dates.
Contacts.
Fragments of conversations.
Pieces of information that meant little in isolation.
Together they made a picture.
Incomplete.
But enough.
That was the first moment I understood the real problem of anonymity.
Anonymity is not the state of “nobody knows who you are”.
It is a problem of quantity of information.
If one person has one fragment, little follows from it.
If ten people have a few fragments each, a pattern appears.
And a pattern can lead to a person.
You have to disappear
One night a message arrived.
I do not remember the exact hour.
I remember the contents.
You have to disappear.
Nothing more.
No reason.
No explanation.
No question.
I read it several times.
The first thought was banal: someone is trying to scare me.
The second was worse: someone is warning me.
The third was the worst: someone already knows.
I did not sleep that night.
Not because I expected the police at the door.
I was afraid of something more abstract.
I did not know who was watching me.
I did not know whether anyone was watching me.
I did not even know whether the message was real.
But from that moment every possibility felt real.
The phone became suspect.
Contacts became suspect.
Silence became suspect.
Every message could be a probe.
Every question could be a test.
Every person might know more than they said.
The next day a second message arrived.
This time someone used my real first name.
That was the moment everything changed.
Because a pseudonym can be a coincidence.
A nick can be found.
A number can leak.
But my name?
It should not have been there.
I started analysing the past.
Not like a criminal.
Like a system administrator trying to find the source of an incident.
That was the first situation in which my technical thinking proved more useful than experience of the scene itself.
Instead of asking: “Who knows me?”
I started asking: “Who could have had access to which fragment of information?”
That changed everything.
A map appeared.
Not on a computer.
In my head.
Person A knew person B.
B knew C.
C knew D.
D knew a place.
Someone knew a number.
Someone knew a pseudonym.
Someone knew a real first name.
And I started connecting the points.
And then I noticed something I had not seen before.
All the paths led to one person.
Not the one I had thought was the most important.
Someone else.
Someone who almost never spoke.
K
Let us call him “K”.
Not because that was his name.
I simply need a letter.
K never looked like a leader.
He had no grand declarations.
He did not try to impress.
He did not threaten.
He did not talk about money.
He did not post photographs.
He did not build a legend around himself.
He was boring.
And that is exactly why I had overlooked him.
The longer I analysed old contacts, the more I began to understand his role.
He did not control people directly.
He controlled the flow of information.
That was far more effective.
He did not need to know everyone.
It was enough that he knew who knew whom.
He did not need to issue orders.
It was enough that the right information reached the right person.
He did not need to know the whole operation.
It was enough that he knew the structure.
Then something else reached me.
My “safety” had never come from being unimportant.
It came from being useful.
That is an enormous difference.
A useful person is safe only for as long as they remain useful.
If they stop being needed, they change category.
From an asset they become a risk.
And a risk can be removed.
I do not know exactly what happened later.
And I will not pretend I have answers to every question.
Over time contacts started to disappear.
Some suddenly.
Others slowly.
Some simply stopped answering.
Some people had probably moved on.
Some had probably run into trouble.
Some may simply have changed their lives.
The darknet has one particular feature: you never know whether someone vanished because they ran, or because they lost the ability to come back.
The weight
I started withdrawing too.
There was no single spectacular moment.
There was no scene in which I close the laptop and say: “That’s it.”
Reality does not work like that.
You stop answering one message.
Then another.
You stop checking one place.
Then another.
Contacts slowly lose their meaning.
Risk stops feeling exciting.
The money stops being worth a price you had not noticed before.
The hardest part was something else.
After leaving, I still knew how that world worked.
That does not disappear.
The knowledge stays.
The contacts may stay.
The memory stays.
And for a while you have the impression that you possess something exceptional.
Access.
Information.
A history.
A secret.
Only later do you start to understand that most of those things are not an asset.
They are a weight.
Today I am interested in the mechanism.
Not the legend.
Not the myth of the darknet.
Not a romantic story about hackers who are always a step ahead of the system.
That is a fairy tale.
The real world is far more banal.
Most digital crime does not require a genius.
It requires organisation.
Social engineering.
Carelessness.
Greed.
Haste.
Sometimes ordinary bad luck.
And people who are willing to do something for money.
What changed most was how I looked at the victim.
Once they were an element of the story.
Now I know that every story starts with a person.
Someone who trusted.
Someone who was in a hurry.
Someone who missed a detail.
Someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That does not change the mechanism.
It only changes what the mechanism means.
I remember one more thing.
A later message.
It came long after those events.
I did not know the number.
The contents were short.
Do you remember me?
I did not reply.
I looked at the screen for a few minutes.
Then I deleted the message.
And only then did I understand that the whole time I had been making one basic mistake.
I thought the greatest threat was someone who knows who I am.
No.
The greatest threat is someone who knows how much I do not know.
A warning or a test
For years I thought of myself as a man standing at the end of the chain.
Today I think there was no end.
There was only a network.
Some people passed money.
Others information.
Still others contacts.
Everyone held a fragment.
Nobody saw the whole.
Or maybe one person did.
Maybe K.
Maybe someone above him.
Maybe no one.
And here is the question I did not want to ask myself for a long time.
Why did I get that message?
Why did someone warn me, of all people?
Why did they use my real first name?
And why did everything start falling apart afterwards?
For years I assumed the answer was simple.
Someone wanted to protect me.
Today I am no longer sure.
Because there is a second possibility.
A much worse one.
Maybe that message was never a warning.
Maybe it was a test.
If that is so, the whole period looks different.
I was not a man who happened to learn too much.
I was a man who was allowed to learn just enough to see what he would do.
That would mean someone had been watching me much earlier than I thought.
That my questions were noticed.
My contacts analysed.
My behaviour assessed.
And the message “you have to disappear” was not meant to save me.
It was meant to check whether I would disappear.
I do not know if that is true.
I have no proof.
And that is exactly why this hypothesis is more unsettling than all the others.
Because it cannot be ruled out completely.
There is one more detail.
When I later tried to reconstruct the history of those contacts, I found something strange.
In one place messages were missing.
Not a single one.
A whole fragment.
As if the conversation had been cut out.
I do not know by whom.
I do not know when.
I do not know why.
Maybe it was chance.
Maybe automatic deletion.
Maybe someone simply wiped the history.
Or maybe someone wanted me never to see one particular fragment.
I will never know which version is true.
And perhaps that is the most honest ending to this story.
There is no grand finale.
There is no surname of the person at the top.
There is no map of the whole structure.
There is no last meeting.
There is no film in which every piece falls into a perfect whole.
There is only memory.
Fragments.
People who are no longer in my life.
Money that is no longer there.
Contacts that stopped working.
And knowledge that remained.
Traces
Today, when I look at a computer screen, I see something completely different from before.
An IP address.
A domain.
A log.
An account.
A process.
A number.
Data.
Once they were tools to me.
Now I see traces in them.
Every system leaves traces.
Every person does too.
There is no such thing as perfect invisibility.
There are only different levels of visibility.
That is probably the greatest irony of the whole story.
I entered that world because it seemed to be a world of invisible people.
I left it convinced that invisibility is one of the most oversold ideas on the internet.
You can hide a surname.
You can change a pseudonym.
You can change a number.
You can change an account.
You can change a place.
But behaviour remains.
Relationships remain.
Mistakes remain.
People remain.
And people are the worst security system there is.
I am no longer the cash man.
Not because one day I became a different person.
Those transformations look good in films.
In reality you simply stop doing the next things.
One after another.
Until one day you realise you have not gone back to the old world in a long time.
Sometimes, though, messages come back.
An old nick.
An unknown number.
A short text.
Remember?
Yes.
I remember.
I remember the ATM.
I remember the cash.
I remember people without surnames.
I remember people who knew my surname.
I remember places that were supposed to be invisible.
I remember how easily a person starts treating crime as a service.
I remember how easily a service turns into routine.
And I remember the most important thing: I was never outside the system.
I was an element of it.
The same as the people I thought of as clients.
The same as the people I thought of as principals.
The same as those I never met.
The only difference was that some of them saw a larger fragment.
And I saw mine.
To this day I do not know who K was.
Maybe he was only an intermediary.
Maybe someone far more important.
Maybe the whole story I spent years trying to reconstruct is only a set of coincidences that look like a plan after the fact.
That is possible too.
The human brain cannot stand empty spaces.
It connects the dots.
It builds patterns.
It gives meaning to chance.
That is why I do not claim to know the whole truth.
I only claim that I was close enough to see a fragment.
And far enough never to see the whole.
Perhaps that is what the real darkness of the internet is.
Not that you see nothing.
That you see only as much as someone wants to show you.
And when you start seeing too much, a question appears: who decided that you were allowed to see it?
That question stayed with me.
Longer than the money.
Longer than the contacts.
Longer than all the pseudonyms.
And perhaps that is why today, when someone says to me: “I know people from the darknet.”
I do not ask: “Who?”
I ask: “And how do you know that they know you?”