By now he was fourteen years old.
After a while eBay purchasers learned to be suspicious of items sold in some Central European countries where this scam was prevalent, so the gang had to adapt. Alex became an “arrow,” a money mule. The eBay cons were tweaked so that they went through money-transfer offices and PO boxes all around Western Europe, and Alexandru and other kids like him would spend their days on buses or trains, traveling from one country to another, accepting money at wire transfer offices, picking up checks at PO boxes, and immediately sending them back home to his cohorts.
As e-commerce changed, so did Alexandru Dalca’s con operations on the Internet. The work ethic he learned as a starving orphan, as well as the English he learned growing up in the hostel, made him the brains of his own operation by age sixteen, and by nineteen he drove a used Porsche 911 through the town.
There was no doubt his life’s track would have him running his own major operation by his mid-twenties, if it hadn’t been for the Americans.
The FBI kicked in the door to his Bucharest apartment one night, along with a special unit of Romanian cyberinvestigators. Since Alex Dalca was a well-known arrow for a high-dollar ring that had ripped off thousands of Americans, he was made an example of by the Romanians, and sent to Jilava Prison near Bucharest for a term of six years.
He’d had no love for anyone before this point, but now he had a passionate hatred for Americans.
Jilava Prison had three things that would turn Alexandru Dalca into something powerful and dangerous over the next six years. A library, dozens and dozens of other con men… and a spy.
The spy was Luca Gabor, a former case officer for the Romanian Intelligence Service who’d been recruited into an Internet scamming company because of his ability as a social engineer and the myriad “dual purpose” skills that made him both a good case officer when “running” an agent as well as a crook. Gabor was four years into a sixteen-year sentence, and he saw in twenty-one-year-old Dalca a way to pass on his abilities to someone who could go back on the outside and employ them, and in turn give a cut to the convicted spy’s teenage daughter.
Gabor built upon Alexandru Dalca’s already impressive skills, teaching him how to convince anyone of anything, but more important, he taught Dalca how to use open-source intelligence to discover people’s secrets.
At the same time, Dalca read every piece of literature in the prison library about computers, software, applications, and social media.
His intelligence officer mentor gave him a list of books to read and websites to study for the day he left prison, and he promised Dalca he’d set him up with a job at his old company along with a new start.
On that rainy morning Dalca left Jilava and was picked up in a Mercedes sedan and taken to a new apartment in Bucharest’s city center by a new employer arranged by Luca Gabor.
Alex Dalca was a new man, fortified with skills that could have been used for good or evil. He would have been an incredible asset to any intelligence agency in the world, including the United States, if not for one fatal flaw.
Alexandru was in it for the money, and he had no concept of the pain he caused others in acquiring that money.
His childhood made him a person socially disinterested in others, despite his incredible ability to influence them. Prison had just compounded all this, and even though Dalca had the raw materials for survival and even success, he never thought about any other person’s wants or needs.
It wasn’t just that he was not an empathetic or understanding person.
Alexandru Dalca did not even understand that there was something there to understand.
To him, there was no good, and there was no bad. There was only Alexandru Dalca, and everyone else. He was in competition with all other life forms on planet Earth, here to maximize his own gains, unaware of the costs incurred by others.
Dalca was, by any clinical definition, a sociopath.
Success for him was achieving the objective in front of him, and thereby gaining wealth. He was not married, and he was disinterested in sex other than as an occasional biological need.
No, he worked, day in and day out, for the same company his mentor in prison had worked for, a firm called ARTD, Advanced Research Technological Designs.
There exist companies that are built like regular aboveboard operations but are wholly in the business of illegal activity. They couch their operations and practices in benign titles and descriptions.
Advanced Research Technological Designs is such a company. One can spend as much time on the boring corporate website as one wants and one will not learn a thing about just what it is the company does, what goods or services it provides. One might find contact info for it in the form of e-mail addresses, or a Royal Mail post office box address in London, but no information about where, exactly, ARTD’s brick-and-mortar building is located.
And though its mail goes to London, there is certainly no photo of ARTD’s glass-and-steel London headquarters on their website, because ARTD’s glass-and-steel London headquarters does not exist.
ARTD has its own building — but it’s a four-story drab gray communist-era poured-concrete structure in Bucharest’s city center on Strada Doctor Paleologu.
The dreary structure was full of some of Romania’s best hackers, but it was also full of men and women called “researchers.” These were the ones who made the scams work, who got strangers on the other side of the globe to give over passwords and bank account info, and other details that helped the hacks along.
And within months of leaving prison, the best researcher in the company was Alexandru Dalca.
He was not a computer hacker himself; he understood computers, but he was no coder — he saw all that technical mumbo jumbo as mind-numbingly boring stuff.
What he was good at was convincing people of things, building trust, smiling with his voice, conveying confidence, and getting what he wanted.
And for a company that trolled the Internet looking for victims, arguably the one thing more important than a good computer hacker was a good con man.
And Alex Dalca was the best.
He’d learned more than swindling people out of their money along the way. His job was to obtain passwords through social engineering, and a key component of this work was developing a connection with his target. He would, for example, find himself tasked with getting into the network of a bank in Cyprus. It wasn’t enough to know the name of the CFO, he had to know where the man played tennis, who he slept with on the side, where the husband of the secretary he slept with worked, and where that man went to lunch so he could be spoken with quietly.
These types of investigations became his bread and butter, something he recognized early in his career in Internet fraud as being the most important asset.
He was a master at OSINT techniques, the ever-evolving science and art of open-source intelligence. When he wasn’t perpetrating cons he was reading books on the subject, or he was pressuring the hackers in his company to get him information he could find no other way.
Alex learned quickly that no matter how carefully a person tries to hide his or her identity online, armed with only a small amount of knowledge of close associates, Alexandru could find them and open them up like a wrapped Christmas present.
Everybody had someone in his life on social media who liked to talk. Joe might be in the CIA and a first-rate practitioner of personal security, but his sister’s roommate from college who lived in Reston was all over unencrypted e-mail talking about the cute guy Joe she met through her college roommate and the fact he knew everything about Paris from his time there in the State Department. Looking deeper, Alex could find someone at the embassy in Paris talking about Joe’s arrival party as a consular official, and Alex could back up further, find the moment all Joe’s college social media accounts were scrubbed, something that didn’t happen to State Department employees.