The NCFTA is a non-profit information sharing alliance funded by financial firms, internet companies and the federal government. It s also home to a seven-agent FBI headquarters unit called the Cyber Initiative and Resource Fusion Unit, which evidently ran the DarkMarket sting.

The FBI didn t return a phone call Monday.

Like earlier crime sites, DarkMarket allowed buyers and sellers of stolen identities and credit card data to meet and do business in an entrepreneurial, peer-reviewed environment. Products for sale ran the gamut from specialized hardware, to electronic banking logins collected from phishing attacks, stolen personal data needed to assume a consumer s identity full infos and credit card magstripe swipes dumps , which are used to produce counterfeit cards. Vendors were encouraged to submit their goods for review before offering them for sale.

The unearthed DOCUMENTs, seen by Threat Level, show the FBI sting had begun by November, 2006. An FBI memo sent to the German national police regarding a forum member in that country boasts, Currently, the FBI has been successful in penetrating the inner family of the carding forum, DarkMarket. A March 2007 e-mail from Mularski s FBI address to his German counterpart puts it bluntly. Master Splynter is me.

The DOCUMENTs indicate the FBI used DarkMarket to build intelligence briefs on its members, complete with their internet IP addresses and details of their activities on the site. In at least some cases, the bureau matched the information with transaction records provided by the electronic currency service E-Gold.

Last month, Master Splyntr -- now identified as Mularski -- announced he was shuttering the site as of October 4th, citing unwanted attention garnered by a fellow administrator, known as Cha0. From his home in Turkey, Cha0 had aggressively marketed a high-quality ATM skimmer and PIN pad that fraudsters could covertly affix to certain models of cash machines, capturing consumers account numbers and secret codes. But he began drawing heat this year after reportedly kidnapping and torturing a police informant. He was arrested in Turkey last month, where police identified him as one Cagatay Evyapan.