SPOKANE Growing up in rural Lacross, Robert Moore reached adolescence and discovered he was a high school misfit. Suffering from several ailments, including narcolepsy, Moore skipped playing sports, the normal path to small-town popularity.

Instead he dived into computer technology and found his niche, tinkering with software and understanding how computers connect to each other on the Internet. He became a hacker, going by the nickname “mooreR” and running a Web site with samples of software he developed.

“One of reasons I was so addicted to computers was I found I didn’t need the real world. I had the online world, where people loved me,” he said.

That world eventually led him to international notoriety and a two-year federal prison sentence for his part in a scheme to bilk telecommunications companies out of more than $1 million in stolen service.

Hackers, while portrayed often as bent on harming other computers, also include a middle ground of enthusiasts who test computer security in order to improve it. Moore said he was such an ethical hacker, but he veered toward crime to make easy money.

He moved to Spokane, graduated from high school and became skilled enough to land several jobs, including a project for a firm needing anti-spam software.

In 2005, a Florida man, Edwin Pena, found Moore’s site and asked him to create a tool for detecting certain types of network computers that worked with Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.

About a year later, FBI agents came to Moore’s Spokane home and arrested him, charging him with federal wire fraud and computer hacking. They also arrested Pena, 25, in Miami. He jumped bail and fled the country and is believed to be in South America.

Moore, now 23, was nabbed because he designed the software tools Pena used to bilk Internet phone companies of more than $1 million in unpaid VoIP phone charges.

Next month, Moore will begin serving two years in a federal prison. The New Jersey federal judge who sentenced him also ordered Moore to pay $152,000 in restitution to victims of the scheme.

The case created international attention. It marked the first large-scale hacking of the VoIP system.

He pleaded guilty to the charges, acknowledging his role but saying he was just a provider of information that Pena misused for personal gain.

“What I did was totally wrong, and I have to pay for it,” Moore said. “But Edwin was the guy who stole the minutes and resold them. All I did was find passwords for (network computers) that he wanted to use.”

After his arrest, friends of Moore started a site called FreeRobert.com, calling attention to what they felt was heavy-handed federal prosecution.

But prosecutors said Moore knew all along that what he was doing constituted theft.

“He was a cooperative defendant,” Erez Liebermann, the New Jersey assistant U.S. attorney who handled the case. “But apart from telling us how they worked (the plan), nothing he told us led to any other arrests.”

Moore’s goal, once released from prison, is to earn a certificate in network security and work as a consultant, helping ensure other companies can guard against hackers.

Since his arrest, Moore has been ordered to stay away from computers. He communicates with his friends by phone. What kept him going during the past year, he added, was the support friends and the hacker community.