Getting cheated in a videogame let him to a world of online crime

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Ricky Handschumacher’s first step on a path that would earn him millions of dollars in stolen cryptocurrency and a run-in with the law happened during a game of Halo 3. His Xbox screen went black for a few minutes while he was playing the futuristic first-person shooter game that pits humans against aliens.

When it returned to normal, he had been killed. He was the victim of a form of videogame cheating called “standbying." A gamer friend on his high-school baseball team told Handschumacher about an online forum where he could learn how to use this technique, which he began doing within a few days. Just 16 at the time, he had unwittingly stumbled into a compelling and chaotic community, eventually known as the Com, that was pushing the limits of online behavior.

Over the next 15 years this group of gamers and hackers would grow up with Handschumacher, emerging as a major cybersecurity threat. They developed techniques that would wreak havoc on American technology and telecommunications companies, while earning some members millions of dollars in theft and extortion payments. “We’ve seen an uptick in the severity of and the sheer number of folks who are at a very young age committing serious cybercrimes," said Will McKeen, a supervisory special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.