What did I do?

During my time as a blackhat I was part of several "gangs". My main role was social engineer/vulnerability hunter. I'd find exploits in applications like java,flash and windows and then sell/use them for my teams gains. I became a well known and prolific social engineer. In fact, I ran a service that promised to hack ANY email address for a maximum of $150. Once I successfully gained root/admin privileges I'd then proceed to steal user data and then turn the front page into a exploit page. My team held a botnet of around 12-16 million computers 2-6k servers and 20-30k mobile devices. We mainly used these for banking theft I.e formgrabbers,key loggers. We also filtered the bots into a DDoS botnet. The bots here were mainly US and UK as these on average have the highest potential bandwidth. Spam played a major role in what we did. At one time I think we calculated we output 62% of worldwide spam. 

Why did I do it? 

Survival. You might call BS on this but I started "blackhatting" to survive. Read my about me post and you'll understand why. After a while it no longer became about survival, it became a addiction. I was addicted to hacking. I'd spend several days without sleep creating tools and exploits. The money wasn't my motivation. I loved making a big business deal,striving to be the best, at any cost.

Why did I quit? 

It was my time. I became fed up with the people in the forums,irc's and IM rooms. Don't get me wrong. I met some amazing people and I regularly meet them, truly great friends. I became more and more annoyed with the clients and their expectations. I.e a customer once wanted a bot with working formgrabbers,ring 3/0 rootkit and a bootkit + polymorphic payloads and he wanted all that doing in 2 months and for only 80k. Everybody was demanding java 0-days at ridiculous prices. Overall the market became really,really crap. I also had a kid on the way and I was already banned from 50% of the countries in the world. I had to get out and destroy the evidence so I could see my kid grow up. I really didn't want him growing up like I did with no parents. So I quit. Now I get paid to do almost the exact same thing as I used to do just now I have permission from the company. My life is 100x better and I regret nothing.