Nintendo Thief Jailed For 2017 Hack And "Possessing Images Of Child Abuse"

21-year-old Ryan Hernandez, who had been arrested in relation to the theft of “stolen information, including pre-release information about the anticipated Nintendo Switch console”, has been sentenced to three years in prison.

In 2016, Hernandez and a friend managed to obtain a Nintendo employee’s credentials, which they used to then “gain access to and download confidential Nintendo files related to its consoles and games”. He was first caught in 2017, but when his home was raided in 2019 looking for more information after further offences had been committed, the FBI found storage drives containing not only “thousands of confidential Nintendo files”, but “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.””

His sentence takes into account both offences, both of which are federal crimes. Hernandez plead guilty in January, but his sentencing was only announced today. He’ll be sent to a “facility for inmates with cognitive challenges”, and will also have to pay Nintendo $259,323 “for the remediation costs caused by his conduct.”