Delusions Of Credit Card Grandeur

Fame enables everything, including breaking the law:

According to The Register, however, "Gonzalez, 29, who escaped jail time back in 2004 over his involvement in the sale of 1.5 million stolen credit and ATM card numbers while a member of the Shadowcrew group by ratting out his erstwhile partners in cybercrime, went on to bigger and better things. While supposedly working for the Secret Service, he acted as ringleader in a massive credit card theft and laundering operation involving an estimated 170 million credit cards between around July 2005 and his arrest in May 2008."

Gonzalez himself claims that the Secret Service "treated me like one of their own" and that he was even invited to brief the government agents on malware and other security vulnerabilities. “All of this inflated my ego and made me feel very important and made me feel like I was really a part of the Secret Service with the backing and support of the Government Agency,” he writes. "One day I was unknown and nothing and the next day I am being hailed as a genius."