A 23 year-old Australian man has avoided a prison term over his role in a series of hacks targeting League of Legends and its player database.
The ABC reports that Shane Stephen Duffy, while found not to have been directly involved in the original 2011 hacks themselves (which contradicts earlier claims that he had been), has been found guilty of a range of offences related to them, including:
- Operating a business which sold the account details of hacked players (he made 194 transactions which earned him $32,000).
- Hacking the Twitter account of Marc Merrill, president of League‘s developer Riot Games.
- Sending “threatening emails” to Riot Games.
While the Brisbane District Court found him guilty and sentenced him to two-and-a-half-years in prison (with a further 18-month suspended sentence), he was immediately allowed out on parole.
Duffy has been diagnosed with autism, and had been been home schooled since Year Four (his mother was “fearful of having him medicated”). Because of this, his defence lawyer argued “he was unable to comprehend the consequences of his actions”, and that “he is an offender who has less moral culpability”.
Comments
3 responses to “Australian League Of Legends ‘Hacker’ Avoids Gaol Sentence”
It’s not hard to see actually jail time would be detrimental to his future health and wealth to society.
The amount of times I’ve seen autism and other sorts of maladies mentioned in stories about gamers and threats being made is astounding.
GG/et al especially, some of them (rightfully) got called out and then they would call into account their behavioural issues.
Not for a minute am I linking any of these, but in this case I hope Duffy can learn from this very close shave.
how? how will he learn? did you not read autism, do you have any clue to what that is, probably didnt even know it was wrong, and if even if he was told it still wouldn’t compute for him.
Home schooling and a crazy mother. Gg.