Yanni O., whose player pseudonym is Y4nn0XX, is targeted in three separate cases that occurred between 2020 and the summer of 2022 in France and Canada. After an eight-hour hearing, the deliberation was set for July 3. The public prosecutor requested 3 years of imprisonment including 2 years accompanied by a suspended probation.
The defendant’s lawyer, however, raised a nullity exception on an important part of the file, arguing that the computer data seized during an initial investigation had been reused without legal basis to make the link with subsequent facts.
“Smart” and “harmful”
The debates made it difficult to lift the veil on the personality of the defendant, a young man of 22, dressed all in black, described as a “little fish” by a lawyer for the civil parties but as “intelligent” and “harmful” by a investigator. Above all, psychiatrists have detected in him a “paranoid schizophrenia” resulting in a “attenuation of responsibility”.
Inveterate cheater on many video games, banned countless times for his actions, Yanni O. seems “intolerant to frustration”, guess the magistrates.
In the most recent case, he is accused of attacking the company Fuse III, which administers multi-player servers for the very popular Minecraft title, while he was under judicial review.
If he denies being at the origin of the “denial of service” attacks (DDoS) having led to the destruction of computer equipment, according to the company, he must have addressed direct threats to an employee, have published hate messages to terrorist character on a discussion forum and being the author of a song published on Youtube where he presents his grievances against the company.
” To buzz “
He also admits having joined briefly, a year earlier, in the resounding attacks which led to the blocking of the “My class at home” service set up by the Cned (national center for distance education) as part of new measures. fight against the covid-19 pandemic.
His motivations: “to make the buzz” and gain subscribers on Twitter, he explains between two “nervous” laughs.
The defendant is also accused of several prank calls that led to the intervention of police forces following the denunciation of fabricated criminal acts (a practice called “swatting” in the video game world).
False hostage-taking at Ubisoft premises
His stunt was an anonymous call reporting a false hostage-taking at the premises of the video game giant Ubisoft, in Montreal, on November 13, 2020, leading to the evacuation for 8 hours of some 400 people and the children of ‘a nursery.
He then wanted to lift the banishment measures he was subject to on the Rainbow 6 shooter, dedicated to the fight against terrorism.
To hide his phone number, the hacker, unemployed and living with his parents in the suburbs of Paris, diverted from its use a remote communication software, the traces of use of which were found on his computer, and passed through servers located in Russia.
“I don’t remember having done that,” he told the court, before mentioning an accomplice: an “imaginary double” according to Ubisoft’s lawyer. He then breathes: “I was not aware that it was bad (serious). It was like a game”.
