Zachary Buchta, allegedly a founder of the infamous hacking group Lizard Squad, is facing two and a half years in jail after pleading guilty to hacking-related charges prior to Christmas.

Twenty-year-old Buchta, from Maryland, was arrested in October 2016 along with another man, Bradley Han Willem Van Rooy of the Netherlands, on charges of “conspiring to cause damage to protected computers.”

Both men are accused of running a service called phonebomber.net, a website that enabled paying customers to select victims to receive repeated harassing phone calls from spoofed numbers. The service, priced at $20 a month, was particularly popular with students who wanted to get out of school by making bomb threats, with several schools being evacuated after being targeted by people using the service.

As part of a plea agreement, Buchta admitted to being a founding member of both Lizard Squad and related group PoodleCorp, both of which were involved with the harassment service. Notably, Buchta did not admit to any involvement in more high-profile Lizard Squad attacks, such as its infamous distributed denial-of-service attacks that took down both XBox Live and the PlayStation Network on Christmas Day 2014.

At its peak, Lizard Squad was not only in the news for taking down high-profile targets but also at one stage allegedly for selling DDoS services for hire.

Buchta and Willem Van Rooy are not the first members of Lizard Squad to have been arrested. Another member, Vinnie Omari, was arrested in 2015 “on suspicion of fraud by false representation and Computer Misuse Act offense.”

Buchta pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit damage to protected computers, a charge that has a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. But in return for a commitment to working with federal investigators to take down other hackers, prosecutors are recommending that he only serve two and half years jail time. Buchta’s sentencing hearing is scheduled early in the new year.

Image: Lizard Squad