The trail of bridges burned is quite long and starts in the mid-90s. His early handle was Kimble and he used to hack companies and sell their secrets for money (like PBX access) and did typical war dialer/phreaker/credit fraud scams you'd expect from '90s blackhats.

He came into some money thanks to some German friends of his, one who worked at Lufthansa, and exploited that to "go legit" even though it mostly wasn't his own skills that he was trading on. He still ended up perpetrating a few frauds afterwards that cost friends and investors a lot of money. Look into Monkey AG and Monkeybank.

Why anyone trusts him with their data or investments has always puzzled the hell out of me.

I think people, especially "hackers", just have short memories. It's similar to how like Kirtaner is getting a lot of press right now for going after QAnon (he just had a Reddit AMA), even though the 420chan he hosted in its early years was a hot bed for child abuse imagery and even had a secret /pedo/ board. He also lies about founding Anonymous, which is kind of funny because of what I just said and the whole "we do not forgive, we do not forget" thing.

Jax also finally got called out on her scumbag past recently (although not all of it...) and I'm surprised how rarely this happens...given how much dirty laundry is out in the open...