420

420 says:

Holy shit… I came here for nostalgia but I totally didn’t expect to find my picture here. I don’t even recall taking this picture but judging by it, it was my “spam money” phase. I bought so much stupid shit back then… it’s hard to tell by the picture but that’s a platinum Rolex Day/Date and a 2oz 18kt gold chain.

The AOL days were so awesome for a kid like me. I originally got online thanks to my brother’s GF. She let me use her account and soon enough I discovered phishing. I used her account to obtain my first phish. It got term’d for phishing but by that time I already had dozens of phish. That number only magnified from there. I literally never had a legitimate paid AOL account because phishing was just so damn easy.

I was phishing a lot but I didn’t really get into the scene until one fateful day in which I got pwned after getting a fake prog from a Warez PR. The virus was fun — it locked me into a PR chatroom and people could issue all sorts of commands to make me say stupid shit or even deltree me. I was fucking floored by how cool that shit was. Needless to say, I got deltreed (among a lot of other fucked up shit). While part of it sucked to be deltreed, the other part of me was so fucking excited to discover just what was possible online.

What did I do after this you might ask? I went back to that fucking PR chatroom to find who created the virus and told the creator that was some of the coolest shit I ever saw. I got made fun of for it for a while but I was persistent… we ended up becoming good friends and he taught me a lot in the beginning about aol hacking, VB programming, etc. He was very much a mentor to me in the beginning. We still chat from time to time till this day.

Finding exploits was so much fun back then. Discovering newly cracked <><, specifically leets/ohs/ints was like Christmas. Spending all night online looking for weaknesses was fucking addictive. The few times I found a critical exploit was exhilarating. Unfortunately, so often when any of this occurred it meant I was up until 5AM and literally had to go to school without sleep (the whole time hoping the exploit or phish I cracked would still be there when I got back home).

The scene was fun but towards the later part of it shit got dark. Let’s just say it was very easy to go from AOL hacking and spamming to much more serious shit. I got out at the right time. A lot of the people in my “crew” did not. Several of them did prison time…straight up federal shit. A big reason for this was due to spamming no longer being a viable source of income. So many of us were used to making serious dough then suddenly NOTHING. We were left with crazy car payments, house/rent payments, etc. People attempted to adapt to this new reality by becoming professional black hats. I won’t go into detail here but this is another part of the scene… a part that isn’t really documented for obvious reasons but those in the know… know. For a period of time, serious money could be made in this manner too with virtually no risk. Over time, however, things changed. It was no longer the wild west and those who didn’t take heed got astronomically pwned in real life.

I miss the scene. The good, the bad, and the ugly. It was a time in our lives in which most people will never understand. We were part of something especially unique. A time in which tech was in its infancy and anything was possible.