Kingpin
How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground
Kevin Poulsen's reconstruction of Max Butler's career — from white-hat consultant to running CardersMarket, the carding forum that consolidated the early-2000s underground — and the FBI investigation that finally took him down.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. The link above is sponsored.
- Authors
- Kevin Poulsen
- Published
- 2011
- Publisher
- Crown
- Pages
- 288
- Language
- English
Read this if
Anyone interested in cybercrime as an economy rather than as a series of incidents. Poulsen, himself a former hacker turned journalist, has both the access and the technical fluency to make the carding-economy mechanics legible.
Skip this if
Readers wanting current ransomware-economy detail; the book is 2011 and pre-dates the modern affiliate / RaaS structure. The mechanics generalize, the actors don't.
Key takeaways
- Cybercrime markets are markets — they have liquidity, reputation, dispute resolution, and trust topology, and they fail in market-like ways.
- Most underground takedowns are won by HUMINT and OSINT inside the forums, not by exploitation; Butler's downfall was social.
- The book's pacing makes the carding economy legible without flattening the moral complexity of its inhabitants.
Notes
Pair with Spam Nation (Krebs) for the parallel email-criminal economy, with Tracers in the Dark (Greenberg) for the cryptocurrency-era successor, and with DarkMarket (Glenny) for the European cousin. The book is the gold standard cybercrime narrative of the pre-Bitcoin era and one of the best books on its subject in any field.
What to read before
What to read before Kingpin →Beginner · 2014
Spam Nation
Brian Krebs's investigative deep-dive into the Russian-speaking pharma-spam economy of the late 2000s — the affiliate networks, the rivalries, and the people who ran them.
Beginner · 2017
American Kingpin
A propulsive account of how Ross Ulbricht built the Silk Road dark-web drug empire as Dread Pirate Roberts, and how a handful of investigators across rival agencies finally unmasked him.
Beginner · 1999
The Code Book
A narrative history of cryptography from Caesar ciphers to public-key, told through the people and the wars that turned on broken codes. Still the best on-ramp to why crypto matters.
What to read next
What to read after Kingpin →Beginner · 2014
Spam Nation
Brian Krebs's investigative deep-dive into the Russian-speaking pharma-spam economy of the late 2000s — the affiliate networks, the rivalries, and the people who ran them.
Intermediate · 2010
Cybercriminalité
A practitioner's treatment of cybercrime law — offences, procedure, and the application of criminal law to digital crime — by a French magistrate specialised in the field.
Beginner · 2017
American Kingpin
A propulsive account of how Ross Ulbricht built the Silk Road dark-web drug empire as Dread Pirate Roberts, and how a handful of investigators across rival agencies finally unmasked him.
Explore similar books
Alternatives to Kingpin →Beginner · 2014
Spam Nation
Brian Krebs's investigative deep-dive into the Russian-speaking pharma-spam economy of the late 2000s — the affiliate networks, the rivalries, and the people who ran them.
Beginner · 2017
American Kingpin
A propulsive account of how Ross Ulbricht built the Silk Road dark-web drug empire as Dread Pirate Roberts, and how a handful of investigators across rival agencies finally unmasked him.
Beginner · 2024
Dark Wire
Journalist Joseph Cox's account of Anom, the encrypted phone company secretly run by the FBI from 2018 to 2021, and of the global wave of arrests that followed Operation Trojan Shield.