RaidForums: The child hacker facing extradition to the US

In the coming months, a UK judge will decide whether to grant a US extradition request for a 14-year-old boy who started one of the world’s most popular hacking forums, RaidForums.

Known online as 'Omnipotent', the teenager ran the online forum which began with innocent pranks on streaming service Twitch users, but soon led to life-threatening hoaxes and selling stolen data.

The FBI long knew who Omnipotent was – Portuguese national Diogo Santos Coelho. But they didn’t arrest him until he was old enough to be tried as an adult, leading some to question whether authorities should have intervened earlier.

"Omnipotent, he started RaidForums so he could start his own raiding platform. The idea basically emerged with pranking people by abusing the live stream. If one livestream is over on Twitch, Twitch would allow all of those viewers to go to someone else's Twitch," explained Waqas Ahmed, Cybersecurity Writer at HackRead Media.

"It started as a good idea that turned into disastrous pranks. They would bully people. They would give bomb threats."

"Raidforums was the go-to-forum for leaks and hacks. It was a huge, not only forum, but also a trading platform, exchange platform," said Marco Preuss, Director of GReAT at Kaspersky Europe. 

"The intention behind leaking data was initially just to show off that how good a hacker that person is. They would leak data and they would get compliments from others and they would go for even bigger fish," Waqas Ahmed revealed.

The young hackers soon realised the value of the data they were able to access and began selling it.

"That's when Omnipotent, he started to allow everything. He started providing middleman services for cybercriminals and hackers [...] Raidforums made millions of dollars. The