Max Ray Butler, who goes by the name of Max Vision, was recently charged with stealing the credit card account information of tens of thousands of card holders. Butler, who is known online under the names of Digts, Iceman, and Aphex, has already served time in jail for hacking into government and military computers. It seems that jail time did little to teach this guy a lesson.
Butler is accused of having hacked into several different computer networks from a variety of financial institutions as well as card processing firms. According to the indictment, he then sold the identity and account information that he gained and also received a kickback from the profit that others made when selling the merchandise that they were able to purchase with the stolen account information.
The Secret Service has been on Butler’s trail for awhile, as the agency has been gathering information about his criminal activity since June of 2005. In one undercover operation, Butler actually sold information from 103 credit card accounts to a Pennsylvania man that was working with the authorities.
In order to do his business, Butler and his cohorts gathered on a Web site where the credit card information was bought and sold. As of earlier this month, the site already had thousands of members throughout the world. Although the site remained online after Butler was arrested, the forums had been deleted. In addition, a forum administrator working under the login ID of “Achilous” left a message to members stating that the threads were immediately erased after news of Butler’s arrest was made known.
Achilous went on to say, “Everybody who hasn’t already done so, I would strongly advise that you delete all PMs you have saved. Also, any unsecured data you have, now would be the time to make sure it is very strongly encrypted. These precautions seemed justified given the severity of the situation. It may only be a matter of time before a government agency takes over this forum, and I did not want them to get the raw SQL database containing all the threads and posts.”
Aw, what a great guy he must be to be giving out advice like that to his fellow thieves.
Achilous must really have a big heart for Butler, as he has also referred to Christopher Aragon as a “rat” because he has decided to roll over on Butler. Of course, Aragon did so in order to save his own backside after he was arrested for using his fraudulent credit cards.
It seems that Aragon and a cohort by the name of Guy Shitrit were arrested after purchasing over $13,000 worth of handbags at Bloomingdales with a fake American Express card. After being arrested, Achilous banned Aragon from the forum for what he referred to as “security reasons.”
The most ironic part of this whole story is the fact that Butler was once an FBI informant who worked with the Bureau for at least two years and possibly for five years. He was also a well-known security researcher while in his early to mid-20s. There is nothing sadder than a good guy gone bad.
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