Early last month we reported how Ashley Michell of England hacked Zynga Poker and stole 400 billion poker chips which he then sold on the black market for about $85,000. Although they were virtual poker chips, if Zynga had sold them legitimately the value would have been $12 million. If he had managed to sell them all his total profit would have been about $295,000. The court was told the difficulty in valuing the chips was because they only existed in the online world.
On Friday at a UK Court, the Zynga Poker hacker, 29 year old Ashley Mitchell was jailed for two years after admitting five charges of hacking and theft.
Zynga is the very popular poker software played via social networking sites such as Facebook.
Mitchell used false Facebook accounts and a front company to attempt to sell the chips, to other players for a fraction of their face value. As well as the hacking and taking private property charges, Mitchell asked for another 41 offences to be taken into consideration.
He was also sentenced to an extra 30 weeks for breaching a 40-week suspended sentence imposed in 2008 for hacking.
