Nintendo isn't afraid to take legal action against individuals who hack its platforms or try to pirate its games, and this week one of those hackers is heading to prison and owes the company a lot of money.
As the Department of Justice explains, 21-year-old Ryan Hernandez first appeared on the FBI's radar back in 2016 when he used phishing techniques with the help of an associate to steal the credentials of a Nintendo employee. Those credential were then used to access confidential Nintendo files and steal pre-release information about the Switch console. Hernandez, known online as "RyanRocks," shared the details publicly.
The hack and theft was tracked back to Hernandez in 2017 when the FBI contacted him and his parents as he was a minor. At the time, he promised to cease "further malicious activity," but ultimately broke that promise. From June 2018, he resumed "hacking into multiple Nintendo servers and stealing confidential information about various popular video games, gaming consoles, and developer tools." Some of the information stolen was shared publicly and Hernandez ran an online chat forum called "Ryan's Underground Hangout" to discuss and share information.
Ultimately, this activity led the FBI to search Hernandez's home, where they not only discovered thousands of confidential Nintendo files, but also he, "had used the internet to collect more than one thousand videos and images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, stored and sorted in a folder directory he labeled “Bad Stuff.”"
After pleading guilty, Hernandez received a sentence of three years in prison and has agreed to pay Nintendo $259,323 in restitution. US District Judge John C. Coughenour recommended he be incarcerated at a Bureau of Prisons facility for inmates with cognitive challenges, and that he's placed on seven years of supervised release following the prison term. Hernandez also has to register as a sex offender.