PERSONAL BACKGROUND
- NAME: Max Ray Vision (Max Ray Butler)
- BORN: July 10, 1972
- WHERE: Meridian Idaho
- OCCUPATION: Hacker
Biography
Max was born and raised in Meridian Idaho. His father was a Vietnam War veteran and a computer store owner while his mother is a Ukrainian immigrant that lived in the US. Early in his childhood he was diagnosed with a Bipolar Disorder after a series of events that had greatly changed his life. When he was in high-school he was convicted of malicious injury to property, first-degree burglary and grand theft after he had reportedly stolen a number of chemicals from a laboratory room, he pleaded guilty. Shortly after this incident, he was expelled from Meridian High School. Due to his young age he was sent to an asylum in Idaho for a two-week psychiatric evaluation as an ultimatum for the crime he had committed.
He attended a year of college in Boise State University where he was expelled due to another crime that he had committed. In his first year at Boise, he was charged and convicted of assault where he was incarcerated in Idaho State Penitentiary and paroled on April 26, 1995.
As soon as he was released from prison, he and his father had moved to the state of Washington near Seattle. With his skill set he had worked as a part-time technical support personnel for various companies. During these years he had discovered Internet Relay Chat and frequently downloaded pirated software called “warez” which he would eventually re-distribute using the resources of his employer, CompuServe (a subsidiary of AOL), he was fired as soon as his racket was discovered.
In the late 90’s Butler had worked as an informant of the FBI for their cyber crime investigation division. His employment in the FBI marks the start of his “online-crime spree” that made him infamous throughout the realm of cyber crime.
On the road to mass cyber crime
During the late 90’s Butler worked as a white-hat hacker for the FBI wherein he was one of the IT forensic specialist that was assigned to investigate regarding the hacking of 3Com’s telephone system for personal teleconference use.
While working for the FBI, he had secretly installed a number of “backdoors” throughout various Federal Websites while he was assigned to fix a security issue on one of the BIND (an internet Domain Naming Server) servers of the US. He was terminated from the FBI after disclosing information about his work on an annual hacker convention named DEF CON.
After his dismissal from the FBI, he was investigated due to suspicion of compromising and gaining access to the computers of the Department of Defense specifically the Pentagon by placing a number of backdoors in their system, he pleaded guilty on September 25, 2000 and served 18 months in a federal prison that started on May 2001. Being inside prison for 18 months, he had met a number of more serious criminals including Jeffrey Norminton, a professional swindler who later introduced Butler to a former bank robber named Chris Aragon
After his “supervised release” in 2003, Butler had again took the path of crime. He and Aragon worked in tandem and their mission is to steal credit card information online. Butler did the theft while Aragon produced the “perfect-counterfeits” of the credit cards. Butler and Aragon sold their finished products through E-bay and earned at least $1M on their first year of operations alone.
Butler and Aragon continued their dirty work throughout the years but the authorities were closing in on them in 2006. Butler was caught in September 2007. For 4 years he was able to steal approximately 1.8M various credit card information that had a potential of spending $18,000,000.
He is currently incarcerated at the Federal Prison Camp, Yankton South Dakota and is scheduled for release in 2019.
Max Butler started out as a White-Hat Hacker, turned to a combination of white and black hat hacker until finally becoming a full pledged black-hat hacker. Based on the interviews done, he plans to become a pure white-hat hacker after his release from prison in 2019.
