| Summary: | The country’s cyber forces have raked in billions of dollars for the regime by pulling off schemes ranging from A.T.M. heists to cryptocurrency thefts. Can they be stopped? Shimomura was a member of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest yakuza crime family in Japan. When one of his superiors asked him if he wanted to make a pile of fast money, he naturally said yes. It was May 14, 2016, and Shimomura was living in the city of Nagoya. Thirty-two years old and skinny, with expressive eyes, he took pride in his appearance, often wearing a suit and mirror-shined loafers. But he was a minor figure in the organization: a collector of debts, a performer of odd jobs. The superior assured him that the scheme was low risk, and instructed him to attend a meeting that evening at a bar in Nagoya. (Shimomura, who has since left the Yamaguchi-gumi, asked to be referred to only by his surname.) When Shimomura showed up, he found three other gangsters, none of whom he knew. Like many yakuza, he is of Korean descent, and two of the others were also Korean-Japanese; for a while, they spoke in Korean. The superior finally arrived, and the five men moved into a private room. Each volunteer was given a plain white credit card. There was no chip on the card, no numbers, no name - just a magnetic strip. The superior read instructions from a thin manual: early the next morning, a Sunday, they should go to any 7-Eleven and use their white card at the store’s A.T.M. They could not use a regular bank A.T.M., or one in another convenience store. The gangsters should each withdraw a hundred thousand yen at a time (about nine hundred dollars) but make no more than nineteen transactions per machine. If anybody made twenty withdrawals from a single A.T.M., his card would be blocked. Withdrawals could start at 5 a.m. and continue until 8 a.m. The volunteers were told to choose the Japanese language when prompted - an indication, Shimomura realized, that the cards were foreign.... |