A notorious San Francisco hacker already serving a 13-year prison term has been charged with using a smuggled cell phone to loot consumer debit card accounts, then channeling the profits into a brash jailhouse smuggling caper that used a remotely-piloted drone to drop contraband into the prison yard.
Max Ray Vision, 46, is a former researcher and consultant once highly respected in the computer security community, but who was undone by a series of misadventures that escalated from online mischief to organized cybercrime and a record-breaking prison term.
Under the moniker “Iceman,” Vision operated an underground criminal marketplace called CardersMarket that brought hackers and identity thieves together to do business. The site achieved legendary status in 2006 when Vision hacked into competing cybercrime forums and merged them into his own site by force, a move that marked the computer underground’s first hostile takeover.
That stunt made Iceman a priority for federal law enforcement, and with the help of informants the FBI and Secret Service tracked the hacker to his San Francisco safe house a year later and arrested him. Vision ultimately pleaded guilty to stealing and selling magstripe data for 1.8 million credit and debit cards that collectively racked up $86 million in fraudulent charges. In February 2010 he was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Source: Daily Beast