The Aussie tech guru pardoned by Trump after Secret Service arrest

Chris Wade was arrested by the Secret Service in Dallas in the early 2000s. It took him on a journey where he went from FBI hacker to Mar-a-Lago and eventually the White House before he came back to Australia to buy his favourite pub. Chris Wade's skills brought him astronomical success, but also a criminal conviction. ( ABC News: Chris Gillette ) Chris Wade has been unsuccessfully sued by Apple, arrested by the Secret Service and summoned to the White House to troubleshoot with Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

He is probably the most successful Australian entrepreneur you've never heard of, and is certainly the only Australian tech executive to be pardoned by the current US president. Despite decades spent in the US that took him from convicted hacker to the White House he is back in his hometown of Murwillumbah on the NSW north coast. Last year, the cyber security startup Mr Wade co-founded, Corellium, was bought by tech firm Cellebrite for $285 million.

Soon after the sale of his business, one company executive called him to ask him which supercar he bought. He responded: "I didn't buy a supercar, I bought a pub". Wade paid $17.8 million for Murwillumbah's Riverview Hotel in December last year.

Chris bought Murwillumbah's Riverview Hotel for $17.8 million. ( ABC News: Chris Gillette ) "But I tell you what, I get way more value out of the pub, and it gives back a lot more. I get to meet a lot of new people and I get to share in experiences.

Wade's current project is teaching a three-tonne welding robot to shake a cocktail, that passion for tech started when he was a child, when his father Peter says Chris was always tinkering with electronics. As well as working at the pub, Chris Wade has a keen interest in robotics. ( ABC News: Chris Gillette ) "We used to go to the local dump and he'd bring home all the electronic stuff he could find, Peter Wade said.

"This is when he was four or five and he'd pull it all apart and make things work and play around with stuff. And he was into high voltage before he was even 10. but yeah, he managed to survive. As a child, Chris would work on his own DIY projects.

( Supplied ) Having learned to code on a Commodore 64, by the time Wade was a teenager he was assembling computers, selling them to friends and teachers. At age 21, in the he early 2000s, Wade moved to the United States, where he got himself into trouble while awaiting his working visa. "A guy that I knew approached me and said, 'Could you write a piece of software that allows me to proxy through other computers?

I said, 'Yeah, easy. No problems. A couple of thousand dollars, I'll do it.

And he took the software and plugged it into a spamming engine. Chris Wade moved to the States at the age of 21. ( Supplied ) The spams promoted financial scams, and because the emails crossed state borders, they were investigated by a federal authority — the US Secret Service. In 2005, armed agents raided Wade's home in Dallas, Texas.

Wade was arrested at gunpoint, handcuffed, and charged with federal crimes. Foreign citizens convicted of crimes in the US are usually deported once they have served their sentence. But the authorities realised that Wade was no hardened criminal, and had some very useful skills.

"I could help them with cases that they struggled with, where they didn't have the technical know-how to solve the cases, and in exchange, my time would be cut down, Wade said. He was fined approximately US$70,000 ($99,800) and sentenced to two years' probation. In that time he began working with Chris Tarbell, an FBI Special Agent who specialised in cyber crimes.

"When I first met Chris, man, I under-utilised him, Tarbell told 7.30. "If some technical question came up in some sort of strange investigation, he would be my go-to. I'd ask him, and everything I'd ask him to do seemed kind of stupid to him. Chris's technical skills became an asset to US authorities. Wade worked with authorities for more than 10 years and helped on some of Tarbell's biggest cases, including investigations into the Silk Road drugs marketplace and the Anonymous hacking group.