Iceman hacker gets 13 years

A notorious hacker has been sentenced to 13 years in jail on charges of wire tapping and identity theft.

A court in Pittsburgh said that Max Ray Vision - nee Butler - pleaded guilty to charges last year and had now been sentenced to the jail time, fined almost £20m in repayments to his victims and will face an extra five years of supervised release.

When Vision, who went by the psuedonym Iceman, was arrested he had the details of almost two million card holders on his home computer; card details which he was using on his trading site cardmarket.com.

We do not know how much money he made through the site, but the size of the fine suggests that it was a significant ammount. Court reports say that the fine was based on the $25 cost card companies faced with replacing a lost or stolen number, adding that it was estimated that the Iceman has personally stolen some 1.1m IDs himself.

This is not the first time Vision has been arrested. Having started his career in crime early by writing a backdoor program that could be used to access federal machines, he was sent to jail for 18 months. And this after doing volunteer work at the FBI.

Having served this time he was unable to find any other work and was, he said in a memo to the court, unable to pursue any other career than that of a life of crime. His punishment will be a lesson to some, although the rewards that Iceman clearly enjoyed before his arrest will be enough to persuade the rest that cyber crime is worth the risk.