[heavyarms]

There's a good book by Kevin Poulsen called "The Kingpin: How one Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground" that is a bit out of date at this point (2011), but it goes into great length on all of the dynamics of the early forums where all of carding/spam/botnet operators did business.

In a forum/marketplace like this, your reputation is worth a lot of money. And if you scam someone and get banned, sure, you can just join again under a new identity, but building your reputation up again means you will lose out on a lot of potential sales.

[Fnoord]

Great book, indeed dated because its pre-dark web (think a place like Hackforums, before Tor was widespread used -- though it did exist, as did Freenet).

The crown jewels in such a community is operator/admin access. For both police (basically, for infiltration), as well as for scammers (because they could create or kill credibility with sockpuppets, bans). Remember that's how Reddit was started (sockpuppets), and Assange did it as well.

[alcover]

That book is fascinating and markedly well written. The underground.. the schemes.. those characters !

It's killing me that Poulsen didn't release another such gem. There's plenty of material in this vein, beginning chiefly with the Gonzales saga - which dwarfs Iceman's story.

Mr Poulsen if you happen in this thread, please ! Do it. I'd pay 100$ for a new story.