He claims to have, and I'm fairly sure he's convicted of doing so in his home country, but I'm not going to contest it because I'm not incredibly familiar with that part of the issue. I was going off of his Wikipedia page, which as always can be innaccurate.
He was well known to folks in the security scene in the late 90s/early 2000s. He had many bold claims, but knew nothing about security and generally bragged about his fictional transgressions for attention. It's not that it's difficult to believe that someone of even low to moderate skill could have hacked such targets during that time, it's just that he was a big talker that could never back up what he was saying.
He initially got rich off of a blatant pump and dump engineered by himself, followed by some Ponzi schemes, and a lot of credit card fraud, most of which he probably wasn't busted for. It wasn't what we typically think of as Dot Com Bubble money, it just happened to take advantage of that investment climate.
Megaupload was the closest thing to legitimate he has done.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/jan/26/internetn...
> He didn’t hack anything
He claims to have, and I'm fairly sure he's convicted of doing so in his home country, but I'm not going to contest it because I'm not incredibly familiar with that part of the issue. I was going off of his Wikipedia page, which as always can be innaccurate.