PITTSBURGH – An iconic computer expert who once worked for the Department of Defense and other federal agencies to detect weaknesses in their online systems pleaded guilty yesterday to stealing more than two million credit card accounts from financial institutions, including Pentagon FCU, and selling the information to wrack up some $86 million in fraudulent charges.
Max Ray Vision, formerly Max Ray Butler, ran the popular credit card web site known as CardersMarket.com where Internet thieves bought and sold information on millions of stolen cards, a practice known as "carding."
Vision, 36, who used the Internet alias "Iceman," was sent to prison in 2001 after he was discovered leaving "backdoor" entries into government sites he was hired to protect at the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, NASA and the U.S. Air Force. After he was paroled from prison, he agreed to work as an undercover government informant to help catch hackers.
All the while he was hacking into hundreds of sites and stealing names, account numbers and PINs that he sold online. Secret Service agents arrested Vision in September 2007 after raiding a safehouse apartment he rented in San Francisco under a phony name.
The computers in the safehouse were equipped with a "killswitch" that would destroy the information instantly if authorities arrived, but the killswitch was never activated.
In addition to hacking financial institutions, Vision, who changed his name from Butler after his 2007 arrest, would hack other hackers, "basically because he could," said his defense attorney at yesterday’s plea hearing.
