Hacker Pleads Guilty of Stealing $12 Billion

Hey Everyone,

If I was I hacker I wouldn't do this....

a hacker pleads guilty to stealing $12 billion of VIRTUAL MONEY!!!

if it were real money, it'd be an impressive haul; A 29 year old British businessman plead guilty this week to stealing $12 Billion 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.

He didn't really hack the site, he just impersonated an admin and convinced others to give him access to an admin account.

More social engineering than hacking.

How would you like to explain to your cell mates that you're in for stealing virtual poker chips from Facebook?

I have a feeling Bubba's not going to be impressed ...

LOL

+1

Wait... Zynga chips have real money value? I've got like 100 million chips from a couple years back before I discovered freerolls...

Gives true Hackers a bad name... really, he didn't even profit from his actions...

You used to be able to sell your own chips but now i think its illegal, they might just ban ur zynga poker account idk if they can actually ban ur facebook or penalize you irl for it.

80k apparently.

If he put his mind to it, just think how many cows he could get for himself on Farmville.

I thought real hackers did it for the lulz, not the money. Unless deceased Swedish authors have lied to me...

i don´t who is the real LOSER, the hacker who steals virtual $$$, or the lame that actually BUYS that stuff...

A related thought: do people realise that this game probably has more registered players than Stars and Full Tilt combined? Aside from the tiddling issue of it not being for real money this is actually the world's biggest online poker site.

I made this point a while back in the pokerstars home game thread -- i really think there is a mountain of money to be made on these casual social players that have flocked to Zynga poker. a MOUNTAIN of cash for the poker rooms, and a MOUNTAIN of cash for the +ev players.

If Zynga teamed up with a real money pokeroom like FT or Stars... omg the fish, the schools and schools of fish...

The poker room that attracts these casual players to their tables will be just rolling in it.

If Zynga decided to offer real money tables... dear lord, one can only imagine the potential payday when those tables first open up.

Yeah, I'm not really that concerned about losing my Zynga account, and the account isn't even linked to my facebook (earned all of it on my iphone, lulz). I have hundreds of millions in chips just sitting there... probably worth a shot to cash those in if there are still buyers.

Anyone with any success in selling Zynga chips?

sick mightsound like childs play to steal some play chips but some people really take serious zynga play chips and will buy alot of chips for an insane of money..$500 per billion

Lmfao ♥

who the heck bought those play chips with REAL cash?!