Canadian hacker Gary Bowser was part of a hacking group that cost Nintendo millions of dollars.
Hackers aren’t anything new in the gaming community but Gary Bowser (yes, that is his real name) is now paying 25 to 30 percent of his salary to Nintendo and is expected to do so for the rest of his life.
Back in 2020, Bowser was arrested for his role in the hacking group called Team Xecuter that would create mod chips, cartridges and jail broken software for games consoles, most notably the Nintendo Switch.
For all of you non-gamers out there, this basically meant the hacking group was making a bunch of games free. As you can imagine, Nintendo didn’t take kindly to this as it can severely cut into its profit margins.
The 55-year-old pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges, admitting he’d sold tools that hacked the portable Nintendo console.
He was sentenced to 40 months in prison in the US and instructed to cough up $14.5 million for his involvement in the group.
In 2023, Bowser was granted early release, however, while it may’ve marked his freedom from prison, it would only mark the start of him having to fork out a serious amount of cash each month to pay Nintendo back.
Bowser spoke out about his early release at the time in an interview with YouTuber Nick Moses, explaining his early release was partly was due to his age, health issues which limit his mobility, and the fact he was born in Canada.
He said he was set to return to the Toronto area, but just because he was leaving the US, it didn’t mean he could run from the money he owed Nintendo.
As of his release, Bowser owed Nintendo $10 million in restitution as well as a $4.5 million fine, and of that $14.5 million.
He told Moses: “The agreement with them is that the maximum they can take is between 25 to 30 percent of your monthly gross income. And I have, like, six months before I have to start making payments.”
Bowser previously claimed that he only received a small fraction of the ‘tens of millions of dollars of proceeds’ that Team Xecuter earned.
He was the only one of the three members of the group to be tried and convicted in the US – another member, a Chinese national, was never arrested, and the third was not able to be extradited to the US.
Bowser was initially charged with 11 felonies for his involvement, including wire fraud, conspiracy to circumvent technological measures, trafficking in circumvention devices, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
In an interview with The Guardian published in February 2024, Bowser said he’d secured housing and pays Nintendo ‘what [he] can’ but it ‘won’t be very much money that’s for sure’ given he’s still finding a job and is relying on donations to help fund his medical care for his leg.
However, he resolved: “It could be a lot worse.”
