Juvenility and Carding

The use of this marginal hacker-lingo, combined with bad spelling and grammar, hurts the hacker image making it appear very juvenile. In fact, this is often very close to the truth. Many hackers are teenagers and approach hacking like it is a fun prank. For instance some webpages that are hacked / defaced simply contain a rant or "tag" in hacker lingo (which is only meaningful to a small number of hackers) or pornography. Vulgarity is also very common. For instance hackers who defaced hacked webpages put "fuck" on 584 of the 2145 pages (27.2%) for a total of 1269 times (June 1995 to 1999, source: www.attrition.org, ctd. in Phrack 55). It appears that these hackers are trying to imitate the actions of previous hackers, without taking on their values (for instance as expressed in the hacker ethic). A teen might see the movie "War Games" or "Hackers," persuade his or her parents to buy a modem, log-on to some BBSes (or now the Internet), find some anarchy/hacking/phreaking files and decide that they are going to be the greatest hacker ever, not realizing how much knowledge, dedication, and luck one needs to be successful. And if hackers are not brought-up by mentors who follow a no-harm ethic, then it’s a simple and relatively easy decision to start profiting from one’s activities through credit card (a.k.a. "carding") or calling card fraud. Thus some hackers become involved in harmful criminal activities, from which the ethical illegal hackers try to distinguish themselves.