A group of men in China have been given prison sentences of up to two years for hacking and defrauding over 11,000 player accounts in Blizzard Entertainment's MMORPG video game "World of Warcraft."
According to reports from Kotaku, ten men were in court in Zhejiang province's Songyang county court where they were sentenced to prison for their World of Warcraft crimes. Five memebrs of the group were arrested earlier this year for hacking. Chen, Ma, Zhu, Zhi and Wang were the names of the five and they wre reportedly led by Chen.
Chen had set up a small workspace where he and some of his friends would go around purchasing stolen World of Warcraft accounts from various black market sources for about $1. After getting possession of the accounts, Chen would then empty them out and sell the accumulated gold and gear for about $3 per account, turning a nice profit for themselves.
Once Zhu learned how to flip World of Warcraft accounts like this, he started his own operation. Together the two ended up stealing a total of 11,500 accounts and earning $10,800 in profit. Soon complaints started rolling in and an investigation was launched. After being caught, Chen and his cohorts were charged with various crimes. Following a lengthy trial, Chen was sentenced to two years in jail and fined $8,000. The others were sentenced to a little less than two years in prison and were only fined $1,000. In addition, all of their ill-gotten earnings were confiscated by the state as well as all computer equipment that was used to run the operation.
So far there is no word from Blizzard of the state in China as to how the affected World of Warcraft players who had their accounts stolen will be compensated for the loss of their accounts, if there is plans to do so at all that is.
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