Hacker Steals $12 Million Worth of Zynga Poker Chips

Gamasutra reports that a 29-year-old British man has been convicted of hacking into Zynga's game servers and helping himself to 400 billion virtual poker chips. "'The defendant sold around one third of the 400 billion poker chips, and looking at the auction history where one can purchase such items, he was selling them for around £430 ($695) per billion,' said prosecutor Gareth Evans, according to a report from local newspaper Herald Express. Sold legitimately through Zynga, the full amount of chips would have brought in some $12 million. The prosecutor estimated that if Mitchell sold all of the virtual chips on the black market, he would have made a fraction of that, around £184,000 ($297,000). Evans admitted that valuing virtual currency can be difficult and that the company was not actually deprived of tangible goods, but he said that the theft could still affect the developer by indirectly causing legitimate online gamers to stop playing Zynga Poker or its other games."

Comments

Re:Prediction

[drinkypoo]

Because you may finish in loosing everything you worked for because the alternative currency is abused by a corporate you cannot even vote out every 4 years.

Alternative currencies are the only way to prevent this! You can choose what to put your money into. Using US or Russian or Chinese money only funds fascism and imperialism. The citizenry chose to elect SomeoneOtherThanBush and was ignored twice so your notion that we can vote someone out every 4 years is laughable at best. That was followed by the Republican party running an unelectable ticket so that they could drop Obama into office to make people believe that change had occurred. People are still talking shit about "poisoning the well" when you talk bad about the great black hope.

Corporations are using the US Dollar (hint: The Federal Reserve is a private organization, not a public one) to control us and take away everything we have under the current system, and you argue that a system which permits alternatives to the US Dollar will CAUSE us to lose everything? (Or as you have said, loose everything... Let slip the dogs of finance!)