Betamonkey was someone different. The reason he disappeared without a trace was that he was so bad at PHP that people got sent to prison (his support site was owned by a whitehat and all the customer information was harvested and distributed to law enforcement)[0].
Touchme/Marcus was a close friend of his though, one of his first articles on the site that eventually became malwaretech.com was an attempt to disprove the claim that betamonkey's malware was banking malware. This had gotten him banned from selling on hackforums, his main source of customers at the time. You have to read the article on the way back machine, for some reason he deleted it from his site later on [1].
If I were betamonkey I would be sweating pretty hard right now, his malware is also still being used and Marcus will be looking hard for someone else to drag under the bus.
Touchme/Marcus was a close friend of his though, one of his first articles on the site that eventually became malwaretech.com was an attempt to disprove the claim that betamonkey's malware was banking malware. This had gotten him banned from selling on hackforums, his main source of customers at the time. You have to read the article on the way back machine, for some reason he deleted it from his site later on [1].
If I were betamonkey I would be sweating pretty hard right now, his malware is also still being used and Marcus will be looking hard for someone else to drag under the bus.
[0] http://www.xylibox.com/2015/04/betabot-retrospective.html [1] https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20130625172146/http://touch... (halfway down the page)