[3] The website has been widely reported as facilitating online criminal activity,[4][5][6][7] such as the case of Zachary Shames, who was arrested for selling keylogging software on Hack Forums in 2013 which was used to steal personal information.

[8] In June 2011, the hacktivist group LulzSec, as part of a campaign titled "50 days of lulz", breached Hack Forums and released the data they obtained.

[13][non-primary source needed] According to a press release[8] from the U.S. Department of Justice, Zachary Shames developed a keylogger in 2013 that allowed users to steal sensitive information, including passwords and banking credentials, from a victim's computer.

MegalodonHTTP included a number of features as "Binary downloading and executing", "Distributed Denial of service (DDoS) attack methods", "Remote Shell", "Antivirus Disabling", "Crypto miner for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Omnicoin and Dogecoin".

[25] On Monday, 26 February 2018, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported[26] that Ukrainian authorities had collared Avalanche cybercrime organizer Gennady Kapkanov, who was allegedly living under a fake passport in Poltava, a city in central Ukraine.

He marketed the Remote Administration Tool (NanoCore RAT) and another software licensing program called Net Seal exclusively on Hack Forums.

There were rumours among users of Hack Forums that Nokia2mon2 was connected to the government of Saudi Arabia and he was using the website as a resource to perform espionage on journalists, foreigners, and dissidents.