Stealing private information has always been considered a crime and this is once again proven as a hacker has been sentenced to two years in a Chinese prison. The person named Chen was the leader of a hacker group responsible for the theft of over 10,000 World of WarCraft accounts.
The five hackers in the group – Chen, Zhu, Zhi, Wang and Ma were all arrested earlier this year. However, the story goes beyond love for the game. As with almost every hacker-connected crime the main purpose was earning easy money. Chen has found a way to purchase stolen World of WarCraft accounts for just under $1 and then sell the in-game gear and gold for about $3. Eventually he created a whole hacking studio and hired people, who were able to flip accounts making over $10,000 in profit.
As the leader of the WoW hacking group Chen was fined $8,000 and sentenced to two years in prison, whereas his cohorts were fined about $1000 and sentenced to a little under two years in the Chinese prison.
It is always nice to know that even in the cyber world people are actually protected against crimes. Even though the gamers, whose accounts got stolen, didn’t get their accounts back, they can rest assured that the WoW hacker group got what they deserved.
You can find the official source of the information here.