In 2010, a Romanian man used denial of service attacks to overwhelm World of Warcraft‘s European servers, causing them to crash. Now, eight years later, he’s gonna serve time.
Image: Blizzard.
The man, 38 year-old Calin Mateias of Romania, was sentenced to one year in a US federal prison yesterday after being extradited last November. He was also ordered to pay Blizzard $US29,987 ($39,916) “to compensate the company for labour costs associated with countering the computer attacks”.
According to a release from the US Department of Justice, Mateias went after WoW‘s servers to exact vengeance against other players over disputes that arose from things such as “the division of loot and membership in raid teams”.
He made those players – and many others, given that he interfered with entire servers and prevented thousands from logging in – pay for not paying up multiple times between February and September of 2010.
In February, Mateias plead guilty to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer, which is defined by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as a computer that’s “used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States”. That led to his sentence yesterday.
I don’t imagine he’ll love the division of loot or raid team membership in prison, either.
Comments
11 responses to “World Of Warcraft Player Gets Year In Prison For DDoSing Servers”
Why does this feel like a veiled prison-rape joke…?
I guess the only loot he’ll be seeing for awhile are delicious ice-cream sandwiches.
“something something…repository for loot”
Hope he suffers. Causing nothing but trouble, just rude.
Agree
They should hang him. So much inconvenience caused.
Is no one else concerned that you can get extradited to another country for a crime committed in your own country? Fuck me, how can the US wield this power?
While it’s great that there’s some justice being done – after a fashion – it’s really hard to feel too pleased about this.
Yeah, some asshole’s getting jail time for inconveniencing an incredible number of players. Meanwhile, politicians are enabling rent-seeking (eg: through worthless, time-wasting, money-wasting contracts for unnecessary services at ridiculous rates awarded to companies owned by mates) for the already-wealthy on the public’s dime using money that SHOULD be going towards helping people escape poverty, physical/mental/emotional anguish and in some cases DEATH, and they’re fucking getting away with it with no jail time at all. The entire financial system has been exposed for just the tiniest fraction of its focus of draining hard-working earners of finances to gamble, and letting the poor absorb the losses, while awarding the wins to themselves. How many will go to jail? Steal millions, your punishment is making it difficult to do it again. Steal a couple hundred at the servo… jail. Anti-whistleblower/journalist laws are making it a worse crime to expose corruption than the actual corruption that’s exposed.
Justice doesn’t exist in nature, it’s a human ideal and a human construct… but it doesn’t exist in the framework we made for it, either.
But hooray. Someone annoying goes to jail; and most likely not because of the impact they had on consumers, but because of the impact they had on whether those consumers would give a major corporation their money.
I’m fucking sick of this shit.
While I do agree it’s fucked up how the real criminals of the world aren’t going to prison, at least this guy going to prison is better than not? It’s the little things.
It seems… disproportionate. Unjust. He inconvenienced some players, but I’m pretty sure the only reason he’s getting the sentence he’s getting is because he inconvenienced a multi-billion-dollar company. And that’s not OK.
I guess! It’s hard to argue your point there.
Can’t really argue against yours either. The status quo is just fucked, is all.
“What are you in for?”
“I murdered a dude.”
“I laundered $1million.”
“I ate a family.”
“I prevented people from playing a video game online.”