Max Butler (Iceman)
termsecurityhacking
The security researcher turned card thief who, as Iceman, hacked and forcibly merged the rival carding forums of the mid-2000s into his own CardersMarket - a hostile takeover of an entire criminal marketplace - before receiving a thirteen-year sentence in 2010.
His arc is the field's sharpest cautionary tale because both halves were real: he wrote intrusion-detection signatures and ran a respected security list while also stealing roughly two million card numbers. Kevin Poulsen's book Kingpin reconstructs it in detail. The case is also where the underground economy's structure became legible to outsiders - forums, reputation systems, escrow, vendor ratings - which is the moment researchers stopped treating cybercrime as hacking and started treating it as an industry.
Also known as: max vision, iceman, cardersmarket, kingpin