Having already done time in prison, Max Butler - aka Max Vision - went to great extremes to cloak his new and allegedly-illegal activities from prying eyes. But court documents filed in a case charging him with five new counts of fraud suggest that despite the care he took, much of his undoing came at his own hands - and the hands of associates he trusted the most.

The hacker, who in 2001 pleaded guilty to unleashing a worm that accessed computers at a US Air Force base, employed a "killswitch" on his PC that allowed him to destroy incriminating data at a moment's notice, according to an affidavit.

"If Butler is within reach of his computer, he needs only 'two keystrokes' to destroy the evidence on the computer," Christopher Aragon, an associate of Butler's who was arrested in May for identity theft, told investigators.