This guy is obviously very smart. But not smart enough to evade the law TWICE.

By Kevin Poulsen
WIRED

A former teenage hacker who once served prison time for an online stock-trading scheme pleaded guilty last week to new charges of cracking a New York-based currency exchange service and gifting himself more than $100,000.

On Sept. 29, Van T. Dinh, now 25, confessed to computer fraud and identity theft in federal court in Manhattan.

Dinh, who lives in Pennsylvania, gained notoriety in 2003, when, as a 19-year-old stock trader, he found a novel way to unload a bad investment in thousands of worthless stock derivatives: He hacked into another trader’s account, and bought the options from his own account.

The gambit made Dinh the first person charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with a fraud involving both computer hacking and identity theft. He was sentenced in 2004 to 13 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.

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