On August 9th, a federal judge in San Francisco, California, ordered a defendant to post his $750,000 bail in cryptocurrency. Martin Marsich was accused of hacking into the website of the video game company Electronic Arts and obtaining illegal access to the records of more than 25,000 of the company’s customers.
Marsich was arrested on August 8th in San Francisco and made his first appearance in federal court the next day, according to a press release from the Northern District Attorney’s office in California. The charges filed include illegal access to financial data on 25,000 Redwood City Electronic Arts customers.
Judge Jacqueline Corley set bail at $750,000 and ordered the defendant to pay it in cryptocurrency so that he could be transferred to a supervised minimum-security center.
Judges have the power to order that bail be posted on any type of assets, said the assistant US Attorney for the Northern District of California, Abraham Simmons.
Martin Marsich, who hacked into the Electronic Arts database, ordered to pay his $750,000 bail in cryptocurrency
While the judge in the case has not told the media about the reasons for setting bail in cryptocurrency, some of the charges against Marsich did not relate to cryptos, but to the use of coins issued by some games. Those coins, which are purchased or won in competitions, allow customers to buy items to be used in such games or to create accounts with access to the games.
After Marsich’s intrusion was discovered, the affected company closed the affected accounts, which totaled a loss of $324,000, according to the Northern District Attorney’s Office of California.
Also noteworthy, the first federal sentence in the United States involving cryptocurrency, more specifically, the Bitcoin (BTC), took place in July 2016, when the Federal Court in Manhattan found Trendon Shavers guilty of federal tax fraud and sentenced him to 18 months in prison. He was also sentenced to pay back $1.2 million in BTC to 48 investors. The defendant ran a Bitcoin investment firm, where he promised weekly profits of 7%, among other offers.
