Ashley Mitchell Will Serve two Years In Jail For Hacking ZyngaPoker

A computer expert from Devon who hacked into online gaming websites and stole millions of dollars worth of poker chips has been jailed.

Ashley Mitchell siphoned off 400 billion electronic credits from a US-based company running gaming “apps” played through Facebook.

He then used dummy Facebook accounts and a front company to attempt to sell the chips, worth 12 million dollars (£7.4 million), to other players for a fraction of their face value.

Mitchell, 29, of Paignton, Devon, admitted five charges relating to hacking and taking private property, and asked for another 41 to be taken into consideration.

In total he made around £53,000 through selling a third of the chips he stole from websites belonging to the Zynga Corporation.

He will serve two years for the offences and an extra 30 weeks for breaching an earlier suspended sentence for hacking.

Sentencing Mitchell at Exeter Crown Court, Judge Philip Wassall said: “You used a considerable amount of expertise, through software you bought, to hack into their computer system.

“The means by which you gained access through their security showed elaborate research and a lot of persistence. The time you must have spent doing this must have been considerable.”

The gambling addict, who runs his own gaming website which pays him a six-figure salary, was caught after Zynga noticed huge numbers of chips were going missing and informed police.

Mitchell had worked out how to access the company’s mainframe computer and posed as a site administrator to download the valuable chips before he was arrested