British Man Who Stole Zynga Poker Chips Sentenced To Two Years In Prison

A British hacker who pleaded guilty last month to charges of stealing 4 billion virtual chips in Zynga's Texas Hold 'Em Poker has been sentenced to two years in prison. The Guardian reports that 29-year-old former accounts clerk Ashley Mitchell made £53,612 ($86,000) over two months by selling roughly a third of the chips, which he stole by hacking into Zynga's servers using assumed Zynga employee identities But Zynga valued the chips much more dearly -- at roughly £7 million ($12 million), or the price they would have sold for through the game and not through the black market. Defense attorney Ben Darby argued Zynga's valuation was meaningless, because the company could create as much of the virtual currency as it wanted, and that a gambling addiction had driven Mitchell's actions. Judge Phillip Wassall was not sympathetic to either of these arguments, admonishing Mitchell for his theft and also for impacting the public's confidence in computer security. "You deprived Zynga of income," he said. "It is quite clear you used a considerable degree of expertise and persistence to hack into the system. It is a considerable aggravating feature that someone hacks into systems in this way when so much business and personal finance is done using electronic means." Last April, Zynga sued third-party currency trading site PlayerAuctions.com for encouraging users to break their terms of service and diluting the value of their in-game currency. The case is still pending.