As an entrepeneur I spend 10-18 hours a day trying new things and experimenting with things, some things pan out, others don't. Some things are white area whereas some really cross the legality line.
Considering I'm not hiding my identity here I will only speak of things that are known and will not get me into legal trouble. So here is a little interesting story for you guys
I'm currently 32 years old. When I was 15 I dropped out of school because... I was just coding, hacking, experimenting all night and couldn't wake up by going to sleep 5 minutes before the alarm. I was making more money in a week then my parents combined with consultancy work provided by the booming hosting industry. I always had a big interest in smart card security (any type of smart cards) and throughout the years I mastered cloning cards (telephone cards, bank cards, access badges,...). Being an immigrants kids in Europe wasn't all too fun and I understood from that young age, if i wanted something in this world, I had to take it.
Because of the work I did to pay my bills I had developed a keen interest and knowledge on unix/linux machines and one day my dad brought home a satellite receiver based on a linux kernel with busybox installed and it had a smart card slot. That was it, I had to know everything about this thing. Before long, I had mastered pirating smartcards for major european content / tv networks (cloning orignal cards, emulating cards) and I started a commercial operation. Turns out back in days, not much people knew how to do all of this, much less automate it (ea dynamic website, instant delivery, IPN paypal integration).
Fast forward 6 months, I was the biggest pirate for paytv in the world (making at least 5000 euro/day in profits).
Major PayTV networks got together, setup a corporation for the sole purpose of serving me with legal documents claiming I was doing them 1 million dollars in damages a day and I was selling more subscriptions illegaly to their networks then they were legally selling...
Got raided 2 weeks later. Since they had served me with docs I had encrypted all my machines. They confiscated everything (from all my properties (homes and appartments), datacenters in Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris), offshore bank docs, usb sticks, harddrives, over 700 000 euro worth of hardware...
Got charged with money laundering, piracy, computer crimes, fraud and a few other things. Served 2 years.
Fun fact: The police investigation into my equipment took 3 years and they didn't manage to crack my encryption keys (they did try to force me to disclose passwords but that didnt work for me)
Here you have it! A fun intro to me
ask away if you have questions
