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Comment by 55555 | Hacker News Reader

HackForums is the Chuck E Cheese of cybercrime. Be careful reading too far into this.

Yes. I bet some news agency or other will run a story based on this, and then I’ll have to hear from laymen how ”cyber criminals actually have a lot of honor in their daily workings.”

Well, that's certainly the case on the more business-oriented forums. People regularly trust each other with hundreds of thousands based on reputation alone.

Not only this, but rumor has it that Omni (the original creator of the site) either sold it off or sold root access to a three letter agency years ago.

The fact that it’s still around and there is clear evidence of it facilitating illegal activity leads me to believe it is in fact a honeypot run by law enforcement in the US.

> The fact that it’s still around and there is clear evidence of it facilitating illegal activity

there are plenty of smaller sites like this too with much more blatant illegal behavior

Link to the rumor?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25025794

As funny as the comment by jlgaddis is, there is no link, I used to be a mod on the site [0] and that's what I heard through the grapevine some years later.

The site's wiki [1] mentions this as well, but I couldn't find a more substantive article:

> [Hack Forums] boasts a long span of historical happenings involving major events such as an FBI scandal, members going rogue...

[0] https://wiki.hackforums.net/index.php/Etheryte

[1] https://wiki.hackforums.net/index.php?title=Hack_Forums

It is interesting how rumours spread and that is why I ask always ask for a link.

I agree, however I would say it could be classed as the equivalent of a "gateway drug"

I got a similar vibe from seeing CSS in the banner image. Tough to take the rest of the article seriously upon seeing that...

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