Convicted console hacker says he paid Nintendo $25 a month from prison | Top Vip News

When Gary Bowser, 54, pleaded guilty for his role in helping Team Nintendo for civil and criminal sanctions. In a new interview with The GuardianHowever, Bowser says he began making monthly payments of $25 to cover those huge fines even while serving a related prison sentence.

Last year, Bowser was released after serving 14 months of that 40-month sentence (in addition to 16 months of pretrial detention), which was spread across several different prisons. During part of that stay, Bowser tells The Guardian, he was paid $1 an hour for four-hour shifts counseling other prisoners on suicide watch.

With that money, Bowser says he “paid Nintendo $25 a month” while he was behind bars. That more or less lines up with an argument Bowser had with Nick Moses Podcast last year, where he said he had already paid $175 to Nintendo during his arrest.

According to The Guardian, Nintendo will likely continue to take between 20 and 30 percent of Bowser’s gross income (after paying “necessities like rent”) for the rest of his life.

The scapegoat?

While people associated with piracy often face fines rather than prison, Nintendo’s lawyers were candid in pushing for Bowser to be jailed to “send a message that there are consequences for engaging in a sustained effort to undermine the piracy industry.” the videogames”. they have been effective, at least as far as Bowser is concerned; He told The Guardian that “the sentence was like a message to other people who are still out there, that if they get caught… (they will) face a harsh sentence. “

But Bowser also maintains that he was not directly involved with the coding or manufacturing of Team Xecuter’s products, and only worked on incidental details such as product testing, promotion, and website coding. Speaking to Ars in 2020, Aurora, a writer for a piracy news site Wololó, described Bowser as “kind of like PR” for Team Xecuter. Despite this, Bowser said taking a plea deal on just two counts saved him the time and money of fighting all 14 charges brought against him in court.

Bowser was arrested in the Dominican Republic in 2020. Fellow Team Xecuter member and French national Max “MAXiMiLiEN” Louarn, who was accused and detained in Tanzania at the same time as Bowser’s arrest, still living in France in mid-2022 and has not yet been extradited to the United States. Chinese national and fellow defendant Yuanning Chen remains at large.

“If Mr. Louarn appears before me for sentencing, it is very possible that he will serve double-digit years in prison for his role and his participation, and the same with the other individual (Chen),” said the district judge of USA, Robert Lasnik. said during Bowser’s sentencing.

Returning to society

While in prison, Bowser tells The Guardian that he suffered a bout of COVID that lasted two weeks and was severe enough that “a priest came once a day to read him a prayer.” An attack of elephantiasis also left him unable to wear a shoe on his left foot and required the use of a wheelchair, he said.

Now that he’s free, Bowser says he’s relied on friends and a GoFundMe page to pay for rent and necessities while he looks for work. That pursuit could be somewhat hampered by his criminal record and the terms of the plea deal that prevent him from working with any modern gaming hardware.

Despite this, Bowser told The Guardian that her current circumstances are still preferable to a period of homelessness she experienced in her 20s. And while Bowser might not be able to hack consoles, he’s said to still be “fiddling with old-school Texas Instruments calculators” to pass the time.