Los Angeles hacker John Schiefer agreed to plead guilty to fraud and illegal wiretap charges carrying a maximum sentence of 60 years in federal prison and a 1.75 million dollar fine, the US Attorney's Office in Los Angeles announced.

Schiefer, 26, admitted infecting 250,000 computers and stealing the identities of thousands of people by wiretapping their communications and accessing their bank accounts. He received help from an unspecified number of acolytes. It's unclear yet how many actual victims are and the total amount of money he stole.

Schiefer worked by day as an information security consultant, and in this position he defrauded the Dutch Internet advertising company Simpel Internet, who signed him up as a consultant, of more than $19,000. Schiafer will make his first formal appearance before a judge on Nov. 28 and will be arraigned on December 3. He worked for Los Angeles-based 3G Communications, and also used his work computer to carry out the crimes.

Schiefer, who on the Internet went by the handles "acidstorm," "acid" and "storm," was well known in hacker circles as a "botmaster," specializing in using armies of hijacked computers, known as a "botnet."

"John Schiefer was an information security professional who betrayed the trust that both his employer and society placed in him," Assistant U.S. Atty. Krause said to Los Angeles Times.

It's unclear how much jail time the hacker can get, but similar offenses were punished, under guilty pleas, with around five years in prison. Schiefer was not taken in custody.

"What troubled me about this particular case is that it involved an individual entrusted with making sure that computers are safe - he was an information security specialist - but while at work, he was infecting people's computers, putting wiretap programs on them, catching people's user names and passwords, and forcing the infected computers to disgorge the most confidential banking information, and then encouraging juveniles to use this information to steal people's money," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark C. Krause.