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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."
I was selling my physical monopooly currency to her for $100,000 for every 100 monopoly bucks. /.
Sadly my news article never earned quite as much attention as this when I submitted it to
I hope to one day throw her in prison, even tho she has admitted to damaging my business model my lawyer is skeptical of a positive outcome at trial.
Something about suing a minor looking bad to the jury.
A lot of currency is already "virtual", ie there is no gold or even paper currency there backing it up.
which is totally what she said
Judge Wassell asked if the case was any different from stealing notes from the Royal Mint. Mr Evans said in theory it was not because the mint could produce more but the thief would have something tangible he could use elsewhere.
This is interesting how artificially created scarcity is being compared with actual scarcity. I am not an online game player who spends money on them, but seeing how easily poker chips are being sold in the black market by the chap, it seems to me that the poker chips one has is nothing more than a number written in a database field somewhere in the Zynga servers (unlike BitCoins) and there is no more record of them than the database transaction logs. So, as I see it, people pay Zynga to increase the value of a counter for them.
However, real currency differ from virtual currency here. Currency notes from real mints have an ID on them, they are real tangible things which cannot be as easily fooled around with. Hence, I do not think the analogy holds.
Never trust a spiritual leader who cannot dance -- Mr. Miyagi
What exactly can one do with Zynga Poker chips, even if you won them legitimately? Can they be exchanged for cash and/or prizes?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
...I'm currently looking at multiple life-sentences for committing mass-murder in (insert name of your favourite shoot-em-up).
Or when BFG-9000 are outlawed, only outlaws ...
Yes, I know... And this is scary: the fact Zynga can function as a "private mint", yet having their currency treated as it would be an official banknote (traded on black-market, valuated against real-world "virtual currency"... that is dollar... obtaining a conviction of a person for "stealing them"?).
Do you think Zynga will take care of the "inflation rate" on their currency? Do you think it is far the moment the "real-world persons" will start to be interested in different "virtual currencies"? How long 'til "real-world money" laundering/tax evasion and other schemes will get too tempting for the "Zynga's virtual economy" to refuse?
Being both virtual, how long 'til the financial will start trading real stock for "private virtual currency"?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Well I think that it's ironic, considering that Zynga steal from everyone else.
It deals with these issues. And is an enjoyable read anyway - as you'd expect from Stross.
Master of Peng Shui.Ancient oriental art of Penguin Arranging)
It's pretty much the same concept as buying a gift voucher for a store. If Zynga will honour their agreement, and the customer thinks it's worth the money, I don't see what the big deal is.
Right... IF
IF the financial world would have honoured their agreement and would have not wrap toxic mortgages in triple-A bonds to be sold to customers that thought the triple-A rating is real, then we wouldn't have spoken now about world economic crisis.
IF the same financial world suddenly see Zynga-and-friends as a way to get around regulations and escape in an "unregulated virtual world", given that your salary in the bank and pension-funds is as "virtual" as the Zynga-dollars, what is going to happen them (your salary, savings and pension-fund) when "game" gets abused?
You think Zynga (the creator of ScamVille) will have any care about their "virtual economy" as long as they are profiting?... in a real-world in which other "virtual mints" compete for the "customer share"? You think the govts will bail-out again if the Zynga economy crashes and bury under the rubles a good chuck of real world "virtual-money"?
Since it already started, it scares the 5#!t out of me to see that a real-world judge protects them!
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Rivalz and Zynga both sell an artificial currency (i.e. not 'legal tender' in any country) for 'real' money. Both have been the victims of a theft. If the thief in the Zynga case has been convicted then the implication is that there's now a precedent.
Rivalz' insight is that taking that precedent to its logical extreme, his sister's about to be forced to turn lesbian.
Yes, I know... And this is scary: the fact Zynga can function as a "private mint", yet having their currency treated as it would be an official banknote (traded on black-market, valuated against real-world "virtual currency"... that is dollar... obtaining a conviction of a person for "stealing them"?).
Why is that scary? I find it inspiring. It means that alternative currencies are possible today.
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.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
It's funny, most of the stuff you have in your pocket is not that much different. You bring it to a bank and it just becomes a bunch of numbers on your credit account backed by nothing. Banks and the goverment basically play the same game, with the difference that they get away with it.
Actually the key difference is that the stuff in my pocket is backed by a government which also enforces laws and regulates commerce. As such it is recognized by that government as having a specific market value and standing in legal proceedings also recognized as official by that government. If governments were to allow private currencies to have the saem legal standing then companies like Visa or Amex could print their own money and let markets decide which held value or not. It's not a completely crazy idea given that we already allow them to sell stock worth many times what they as companies are worth but it comes with a bunch of regulatory issues and probably subjects currencies to wilder swings in value than they already endure. That said if a private currency became a reality then your comment would be accurate and there would be little difference.
My friend stole a few hundred trillion dollars from me the other day, as that's what I had valued my favourite pencil at had anyone wanted to purchase it from me.
The only difference between our situations and the ones in the article is that there are actual transactions taking place, right now, for such items. With so many of them going on, they have a bit of a competitive market, which forces them to be roughly equal in price. This means that, in practice, this virtual currency DOES have a value, as much as one could say a chocolate bar is worth anywhere between 1 and 2 dollars.
Stop being so smug with the whole "omg virtual currency has no value" bit because it obviously does - people spend their money on it. They're just 1's and 0's on a database somewhere, but then again, so is your bank account.