"The internet is serious business", especially if you're trying to mess with services on it that you don't own. A Dutch national has found this out the hard way, having been charged for an attempt at computer crime. Twenty-four year old Anil Kheda was charged for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and making extortionate interstate threads.
Kheda and some of his friends attacked servers from New Hampshire-based Rampid Interactive, developers of the F2P MMO Outwar. Between November 2007 and August 2008, Kheda and his mates were hitting Rampid's servers and taking the game down for days at a time.
In addition to this, they unbanned users and injected money into their virtual bank accounts. Then they took some code to launch a game called Outcraft. Further confirming that they were rip-off merchants of the highest order, they contacted Rampid to threaten further attacks unless they were paid or given other benefits.
Rampid alleges they lost around $100,000 from the two weeks of outages over a nine month period, as well as about $1.5 million for their source code. Outcraft, the pretender's version of the game, has around 10,000 players. Kheda earned around $10,000 for his crimes as well. With a potential five-year sentence hanging over his head, that money was hardly worthwhile.
Source: Justice.gov
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