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PIZZA AND PLASTIC

services, he’d bounce his connection through his private network of hacked PCs around the world—ensuring nobody could easily trace him even as far as his hacked WiFi. He disguised his writing style online for fear that some ill-considered turn of phrase or choice of punctuation might be matched to one of Max Vision’s security white papers or Bugtraq posts—the FBI had once remarked on the copious ellipses in his anonymous note to Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory during the BIND attacks.

To collect revenue, he accepted payment through an anonymous e-gold account linked to an ATM card. Giannone helped him with a second remittance system. The teenager established a business account at Bank of America for a car repair shop called A&W Auto Clinic, then sent Max the magstripe data and PIN code for his ATM card, allowing Max to clone the card with his MSR206. Dumps buyers in the United States could make a cash deposit for A&W at their nearest Bank of America branch, which Max could then withdraw at his leisure with his cloned ATM card.

Max didn’t need the money the way he used to. He’d squandered most of his nest egg from the Citibank cash-outs, frittering it away on everything from handouts for the homeless to a $1,500 Sony AIBO robotic dog. But he wasn’t broke yet, and Charity had just started a well-paying job as a system administrator at Linden Lab, the brick-and-mortar home of Second Life—a fully realized three-dimensional online universe growing by thousands of inhabitants a month.

There was just one reason he was upping the ante now. He’d become addicted to life as a professional hacker. He loved the cat-and-mouse games, the freedom, the secret power. Cloaked in the anonymity of his safe house, he could indulge any impulse, explore every forbidden corridor of the Net, satisfy every fleeting interest—all without fear of consequence, fettered only by the limits of his conscience. At bottom, the master criminal was still the kid who couldn’t resist slipping into his high school in the middle of the night and leaving his mark.