Mitchell Gets Two Years In Jail for Stealing from Zynga

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 - Alfie Williams

In February, Ashley Mitchell was arrested for stealing 400 billion poker chips from the popular Facebook application Zynga Poker. After some debate over the severity of his sentence, the court ruled that his crime was a serious offence and sentenced him to two years in prison. 

Mitchell used several fake Facebook accounts to steal the chips from the application. He then set out to sell the chips to players for $600 per billion. The authorities estimated the worth of chips as being $12 million but at the going rate, Mitchell only stood to make about $100 000 or so. 

This is second time that Mitchell has been arrested to hacking crimes. The first time, he had hacked into his former employer’s servers and was sentenced to 40 weeks in jail. However, he breached his sentence, which he will be compensating for, as an extra 30 weeks has been added to his two-year sentence. 

The crime stirred up a great deal of controversy, as the topic of digital currency was under debate. Do Zynga Poker chips have actual real life value? Was he depriving the company of revenue? The court ruled that the answer to both questions was yes and his sentence reflects the severity of the crime.