Gary Bowser does not intend to spend the next 20 years in prison, so he decided to work with the prosecutor. The hacker will pay Nintendo a huge fine and reveal all the members of his group at the same time.
Team Xecuter is a hacker group that has created mods and hardware for jailbreaking consoles. Nintendo decided to fight its business and in September of last year, the police tracked down two members of the group – Gary Bowser and Max Warren and charged them with a total of 11 crimes, only two charges that could put the authors of the gadget in prison for at least 20 years.
Bowser decided to betray Mario and pleaded guilty to two counts – Among other things, trade in equipment to break the security of consoles. together The hacker is offering to pay Nintendo a $4.5 million fine and help find other Team Xecuter members.
The attorney general decided to seize the opportunity, but the judge also noted that despite the agreement, The hacker may be imprisoned for at least 10 years, Because he pleaded guilty to two counts, which resulted in five years in prison each.
According to the information provided, Bowser admitted that since June 2013 he has been involved in the activities of Team-Xecuter, Axiogame.com and Maxconsole.com. During this time, the group has created and sold a lot “illegal security circumvention devices”, Which allowed players to play illegal ROMs on consoles such as: Nintendo Switch, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation Mini and SNES Mini.
Bowser was supposed to run Maxconsole.com, which was responsible for mainstream hardware marketing, and also contained 13,630 illegal gaming discs. The hacker also confirmed that the newer model of the Nintendo Switch (2018) and Nintendo Switch Lite received improvements that prevented pre-made devices (SX Pro and SX OS) from bypassing console security. However, the authors developed new devices (SX Core and SX Lite), which allowed to continue the procedure.
Team-Xecuter products were also sold by Tom Dilts Jra, who was indicted by Nintendo in May 2020 and the broker agreed to pay $2 million in compensation to the company.
Source: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/switch-hacker-gary-bowser-pleads-guilty-and-offers-to-pay-nintendo-4-5m/