I used to hang with a bunch of people who did stuff like this in the Minecraft scene. I personally never did much other than tell them when they were doing blatantly stupid stuff, but I stood by and watched some idiotic people do some stupid shit. Had one guy try to swat me, but all that showed up were two cops to do a welfare check.

The general prevailing idea in those communities was that credit card theft was a victimless crime because anyone who had their card stolen could easily prove it and get their money back from the CC company. The swatting was meant to intimidate someone who was doing something they didn't like (I personally exposed someone for stealing other peoples' programs and code and selling them as his own, then DDoSed his site he was selling on hugged his site to death when he called me a liar.) Swatting and DDoSing were basically a way of demonstrating who had a bigger stick, and acted as a good means for keeping idiots out. On a few skiddy forums there were even people who would swat, dox, etc... someone for a fee, along with people selling access to botnets to DDoS with, stolen credit cards, stolen accounts, hacked software, etc...

They mainly used unrecoverable currencies such as LibertyReserve and GreenDot cards, along with Bitcoins, or just straight trades for other services. It wasn't too hard to befriend the operators of these services and get them to give you access.

If I had to wager, I'd say most people were 16-19 years old, with the younger ones being driven away and the older ones either getting bored and moving on, or being discrete with their ages. I was on the upper end of that age range.

Honestly, I did a lot of stuff I'm incredibly regretful for, I hurt a lot of people who were doing nothing more than what they saw fit and responding to me being a dick in the first place. I destroyed people's ideas and creations and constantly harassed them until they eventually just gave up.

That being said, I made some good money off of it, and I did meet some of the brightest people I've ever met, along with some of the cockiest.