Sitting in court, Ngo Minh Hieu knew he had fucked up big time.
In July 2015, the 25-year-old was sentenced to 13 years in prison for stealing personal information from approximately 200 million Americans—over 60 percent of the U.S. population—and selling it on the dark web.
That day in court, the judge told him that they had received some 10,000 complaint letters from his victims. Among them was a woman who had lost her house and was struggling to feed her children after her personal information was hijacked by malicious actors, landing her in crippling debt.
It was then that the gravity of what he had done dawned on him.
“I felt like a serial killer,” he told VICE World News. “When I was still making money and living a good life in Vietnam, I thought those information were just numbers.”
“I couldn’t imagine that stealing U.S. identities would bring so much damage to a person’s life.”
Today, his life is unrecognizable from that of the prolific hacker he was 10 years ago. After a seven-year stint in U.S. federal prison, the 33-year-old today is still trawling the dark web, but now working for the Vietnamese government to hunt cybercriminals like he once was. As part of this grand redemption arc, the past year has also seen him tackling a disturbing new breed of cyber scammer in Cambodia, where thousands of human trafficking victims are trapped and tortured in industrial-scale centers, forced to lure internet users into online frauds.
Fueling these attempts to…
