In 1987, FBI agent Robert Hanssen was tasked by his superiors to find a mole within the agency after the FBI's moles in the KGB were caught. In reality, he was the mole, working with the KGB since 1979.
In 1971, burglars were able to steal records from the FBI simply by leaving a note on the front door of the Delaware office that said: "Please don't lock this door tonight".
Eldon Hoke claimed that he knew who killed Kurt Cobain, but said he would "let the FBI catch him". Two days after that interview was filmed, he was hit by a train and killed.
A hacker named Higinio Ochoa who went by the code name "w0rmer" online hacked an FBI criminal database and replaced it with his trademark image. The image he left behind had GPS coordinates.
A 19-year-old hacker named Raphael Gray hacked over 6500 credit cards, other hacker tracked his location and gave it to the FBI because he found him arrogant.
. The FBI seized a server that was being used to host child pornography and ran it for two more weeks. Defendants caught in the sting argued the FBI did a better job hosting a child porn site than whoever originally ran it: The site’s average weekly visitors jumped from 11,000 to 50,000.
At the age of 14, Tom Anderson (also known as MySpace Tom) cracked the security of Chase Manhattan Bank and caused one of the biggest FBI raids in California history, but wasn't arrested due to his young age.