If it were real money, it’d be an impressive haul: A 29 year old British businessman plead guilty this week to stealing $12 million worth of virtual poker chips over four months, managing to sell a portion of them for $86,000.
Ashley Mitchell hacked the servers of online game Zynga Poker at some point between June 30th and September 7th in 2009 and made away with 400 billion virtual chips, going on to sell around a third of that for just under $700 per billion. Oddly enough, this wasn’t the first time Mitchell had used his hacking skills for personal gain; at the time he broke into Zynga’s servers, he was in breach of a 40 week suspended sentence he’d received for hacking into the website of his former employer to change personal information and make some extra money.
Mitchell remains in custody, awaiting sentencing.
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