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KINGPIN

product made Max one of the top five dumps vendors in the world, in a market traditionally dominated by Eastern European sellers.

Max was cautious with his vending. By refusing to sell dumps by BIN—bank identification number—he made it tough for the feds to identify his breaches: The government couldn't just buy twenty dumps sourced to a single financial institution and ask that bank to look for a common purchase point in its transaction records. Instead, a batch of twenty cards could belong to twenty different banks. They'd all have to cooperate with one another to nail down the source.

Additionally, only a few trusted associates knew that Digits and Iceman were one and the same: mostly admins, like Chris, a Canadian carder named NightFox, and a new recruit called Th3C0rrupted0ne.

Of everyone he'd met in the scene, it was Th3C0rrupted0ne with whom Max seemed to share the most hacking history. As a teenager, C0rrupted had discovered the warez scene on dial-up bulletin board systems, then moved into recreational hacking under the handles Acid Angel, -null-, and others. He defaced websites for fun and joined a hacking gang called Ethical Hackers Against Pedophiles—vigilante gray hats working against Internet child pornography.

Like Max, he'd once thought of himself as one of the good guys, before he became Th3C0rrupted0ne.

In other ways, they were very different. A product of a hardscrabble childhood in a big-city housing project, C0rrupted became a drug dealer at an early age and picked up his first arrest—a gun charge—in 1996 when he was eighteen years old. In college he began making fake IDs for his friends, and his online research took him to Fakeid.net, a Web bulletin board where experts like ncXVI got their start. He graduated to small check and credit card scams around the time Shadowcrew went down and then found his way to the successor sites.

Diplomatic and even-tempered, C0rrupted was universally liked in the scene and enjoyed moderator or admin privileges on most of the forums. Max promoted him to admin on Carders Market in the summer