A hacker claims to have tricked Steve Jobs into giving him his Amazon.com account details, as the result of a phishing scam he perpetrated on Mr. Jobs. Calling himself "orin0co," he approached Cult of Mac's Leander Kahney in an effort to sell these account details, which supposedly include his purchase history of 20,00 items over 10 years, personal information, and credit card information.

According to Mr. Kahney, orin0co offered him a screen shot from Mr. Jobs's purchase history, a screen shot that doesn't exactly do much to support the notion that he has purchased approximately five items per day, every day, for ten years.

The screen shot, he wrote, "includes only three purchases over the busy holiday period, and the last visible purchase is dated October 2008."

The hacker...phisher is a better descriptor in that he didn't actually hack anything...said that he tricked Mr. Jobs into filling out his account information two years ago through a fake Amazon.com e-mail he sent Mr. Jobs that linked to a fake Amazon.com page he set up.

Since that time, he said he watched the account and accumulated information, information he wants to sell to a journalist or book author for an unspecified, but large amount of money.

"You get this chance because you were the first on the amazon book selling list," orin0co wrote in response to Mr. Kahney's e-mail reply to his initial offer. "I know you are a serious person, I saw you are editor on wired. Am sure there are lots of guys out there that would die to get a hold of this, we both know what this is."

He also said he intends to put the hurt on Apple's Macintosh image as being less susceptible to viruses by showing how he tricked "the mighty Steve Jobs."

"If this news makes headlines," he wrote to Mr. Kahney in an e-mail, "it will bring some serious troubles for Mac as such, knowing about medial battle between Microsoft and Apple. Imagine how safe Mac is if you can trick the mighty Steve Jobs, what about other user?"

Even if his story is true, it's unclear how he intends to connect a phishing scam to Mac OS X security, but he no doubt has some sort of master plan to bring it all together.

Mr. Kahney declined to buy the material, and neither Amazon.com nor Apple would confirm or deny whether or not Mr. Jobs' account was compromised.

It should also be noted that English is not likely orin0co's first language, judging by his rudimentary grammar mistakes (read the Cult of Mac's full article for the full e-mail exchange between orin0co and Mr. Kahney), and that it's likely he is not from the States, as he used a period in 20,000, rather than the U.S. use of a comma separator.