If you’ve ever been victimised by credit card fraudsters, chances are Max Ray Butler profited by your suffering.

Butler, who utilised the hacker aliases “Max Vision” and “Iceman,” ran an online supermarket for credit card fraudsters. Identity thieves visited his Internet website, CardersMarket.com, to buy and sell stolen debit and credit card numbers, which they used to create fake cards and fraudulently steal goods and cash.

And if that wasn’t enough to rile credit card holders across the globe, Butler also hacked into competitor carder forums and ran them out of business, until he had a monopoly on the industry. He was also convicted of hacking into financial institutions and stealing credit card numbers directly.

Butler pleaded guilty to charges of wire fraud and identity theft June 2009 in the U.S. District Court of Pittsburgh. Last Friday, he was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison, as well as five years of close supervision following his release and US$27.5 million restitution to his victims.

The sentence is one of the longest on record, perhaps the longest, ever given to a hacker in U.S. federal court, according to prosecutor Luke Dembosky.

In his early years, Butler was a security consultant and researcher who volunteered to assist the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. But in the 1990s he was arrested for creating a “back door” malware program which allowed hackers access to computers with a hole in their security systems, including some federal computers. He served an 18-month prison sentence for that crime.

Following his release in 2002, Butler claimed he could not find work and in desperation returned to hacking, according to the sentencing memo filed with the court. The CardersMarket.com forum he constructed was the largest ever by the time he was arrested in 2007.

“It is a shame that someone with so much ability chose to use it in a manner that hurt many people,” said prosecutor Dembosky.

Source: http://www.techworld.com.au