Wired has the inside story of Max Ray Butler, a former white hat hacker who joined the underground following a jail stint for hacking the Pentagon. His most ambitious hack was a hostile takeover of the major underground carding boards where stolen credit card and identity data are bought and sold. The attack made his own site, CardersMarket, the largest crime forum in the world, with 6,000 users. But it also made the feds determined to catch him, since one of the sites he hacked, DarkMarket.ws, was secretly a sting operation run by the FBI.

The author of this Wired article Kevin Poulsen is an editor of Wired magazine and a former hacker who served five years in prison for breaking into FBI computers.

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A related article from 2001.