$10 Million Fine for Modifying Switch - Verdict in Hacker's Case
Gary Bowser must pay more than 40 million in fines. This is the result of a civil lawsuit with Nintendo of America.
Canadian hacker Gary Bowser must pay 10 million dollars to Nintendo of America. This was due to a court judgment in a civil case. The convicted sold so-called mods for Nintendo consoles, which enabled them to run pirated copies of games.
As a result of another federal trial, Bowser has already been sentenced to a 4.5 million dollars fine and 10 years in prison. The current verdict is for a civil trial on the same issue.
The Canadian hacker collaborated with a group called Team Xecuter and since 2013 knowingly participated in criminal activities that boiled down to, among other things, cracking security features of game consoles.
As part of a prior plea agreement, the convict admitted that he "developed, manufactured, and marketed various security circumvention devices that enabled pirated versions of copyrighted video games, commonly referred to as ROMs, to run on consoles."
Nintendo has been pursuing Bowser for years, but it wasn't until October 2021 that there was some sort of breakthrough in the case. That's when the cheater received federal charges. Before that, he was found in the Dominican Republic, then arrested and deported to the United States.
