Hacker Charged With Fraud After 'Stealing' In-game FIFA Currency (cnet.com)

The FBI said it believes a group of hackers made millions off a scam to defraud publisher Electronic Arts. From a report on CNET: A US man is facing felony wire fraud charges for the theft of digital currency from game developer Electronic Arts. According to an FBI indictment, Anthony Clark and his co-defendants are being charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud for "stealing" in-game currency in multiplayer football game FIFA Ultimate Team for Xbox One, PS4 and PC. The indictment details that Clark and three others, named as Ricky Miller, Nicholas Castellucci and Eaton Zveare, members of hacking group RANE Developments, designed an app using the game's source code and developer kit. This app fraudulently told EA's servers that thousands of matches had been completed in the game. These completion reports were rewarded with FIFA coins, which the group sold to what the FBI called "black market" coin dealers. Between them, the group earned $15-$18 million.

Comments

$15-$18 million of real money or FIFA money?

[Huckleberry_Hell_Raz]

If real, that is more lucrative than most apps that are developed!

Re:$15-$18 million of real money or FIFA money?

[msauve]

Fraud is deliberate deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain. How is it not fraud?

Re:$15-$18 million of real money or FIFA money?

[H3lldr0p]

Well, who did they deceive? The blurb says that everything was done through the game's API. If EA wasn't keeping track of how often games were reporting as being finished, how is this an exploit or deception? AFAICT, everything was done out in the open. So it goes back to how is this deception?

Re:$15-$18 million of real money or FIFA money?

[msauve]

Really? I mean really? Is English a second language for you? They were telling the system that games were played which had not been played.

Re:$15-$18 million of real money or FIFA money?

[jandrese]

My guess is that it was the part where they sold the coins to other people knowing full well that EA could revoke the coins or terminate the accounts of anyone who bought them.

But yeah, the actual crime of writing a bot to farm coins seems more like a TOS violation than a felony. Punishment should probably be limited to getting kicked out of the game and never being allowed back online. Maybe even kicked out of EA online servers entirely.

Re:$15-$18 million of real money or FIFA money?

[Drethon]

Fraud is deliberate deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain. How is it not fraud?

Because it didn't really happen in our universe. It virtually happened within a nested universe. It's a game, not real life. The "gain" is virtual.

What's next? "You murdered that other player in the gladiator wave of Joust!" or maybe "Hey, someone came to my Clash of Clans base and stole some of my gold and elixer!" or maybe "you solicited sex for money in Leisure Suit Larry!"

Congress coins money; EA does not. What happens to EA currency isn't real. He should be charged for fraud (or justice dispensed however they do it) within the virtual universe, not within ours. If you kill me in Joust, I just kill you back (as deterrent; is 3000 points worth my wrath?); I don't go crying to mama outside of the game. And if I do go crying to mama, mama's job is to tell me to settle the fuck down.

If you start getting confused about the nesting within universes, you're going to cause a lot of problems and paradoxes. I will eat YOUR dots, Pac-msauve. Don't, and don't legitimize those who do.

"Between them, the group earned $15-$18 million."

This appears to be real world cash they netted, at this point it has left the game world.

Though if selling imaginary world things for real world cash isn't fraud, I have a great vacation home in middle earth to offer you!

Re:$15-$18 million of real money or FIFA money?

[tattood]

For example, $15 million dollars owned by EA.

Unless players can also purchase coins from EA (which I don't think you can do), then they didn't steal $15 million from EA. They sold the coins on the black market to other players who used the coins to get whatever you can get from the EA store. If you google "FIFA Ultimate Team coins" you will find a hundred sites where you can purchase coins.

This is no different than the gold farmers in World of Warcraft, except they found a way to get coins much quicker than you could from gold farming.

Re:$15-$18 million of real money or FIFA money?

[bhiestand]

Though if selling imaginary world things for real world cash isn't fraud, I have a great vacation home in middle earth to offer you!

If online currency and items have real-world cash value, I'd like to see EA defend the illegal gambling in most of their games.

Re:They were able to do this because...

[alvinrod]

No, they were able to do this because EA was dumb. Never trust state information that the client is giving you in a networked game or at the very least sanity check it occasionally if its not feasible to do everything server-side. Anyone who played MMOs or shooters back in the 90's probably has fond memories of all the crazy hacks people could use because the server would just accept whatever data the client sent.

Re: They were able to do this because...

[Anonymous Coward]

besides, "in-game" currency is an unlawful fraud to begin with.

Stealing

[freeze128]

I like they way that you put "stealing" in quotes. It's not really stealing because EA did not lose any money. The hackers found a way to make the FIFA game CREATE money for them, and then they sold that in-game money for real money. The only people who are out "Real" money are the clients who bought the in-game currency, but they have something to show for it.

If anything, the people who bought the in-game currency from the hackers should sue EA for making a crappy program that someone could abuse.

Re:Stealing

[wardrich86]

The real question is if the hackers declared the income. If they did, I really don't see how they managed to get in trouble for selling game data for cash... seems fucky. If it were earned the way EA expected the credits to be earned and then sold, would they still care?

Re:Stealing

[Sowelu]

If you sell limited-edition prints of a painting, and people buy it because having one out of only a hundred has value to them, then someone making counterfeits is decreasing the value even if they don't directly take from the original creator.

If these game points are considered to have value because they take time, effort or skill to obtain, and then someone finds a way to manufacture more of those points by deception, then clearly it's diminishing the value of the legitimate ones.

Re:Back in Lienage 2 days

[Moof123]

Yeah, this.

It never seems to rise to fraud when unplayable buggy games are shipped, or are missing advertised features. Nobody in power bats an eye when multiplayer games have their servers shut off and thus ruin the value of something I paid for, or when the first sale doctrine is violated and I can't sell my property due to DRM.

So yeah, these guys behaved badly, but it sort of like finding out a mobster's house got robbed. I have no sympathy to spare, and kind of hope the thieves get off.

Re: They were able to do this because...

[Sowelu]

If these points were 'earned' from playing games, then it sounds like they're not much different from winning tickets at a Skee-Ball machine. If the publisher decides to gate content behind them, I don't see how that's even the slightest bit unethical. They create content and then limit access to it.

This seems a lot like printing your own skee-ball reward tickets, using them to "buy" passes to the exclusive backroom pinball arcade, then selling them on Ebay. You obtained a thing through deception, and everyone in the transaction agrees that the thing has value. How isn't that fraud?

Re:IRS to go after any one that wins in game cash

[Motherfucking Shit]

IRS to go after any one that wins in game cash now?

Hardly. But if you sell your in-game cash for $15 million in real money, the IRS will want their cut of the profit.

Re:EA are criminals so what

[91degrees]

If you commit a crime against criminals you're still a criminal. But that's beside the point. It's a tech story. The way they pulled of the fraud is of interest to certain people for various reasons.

Re: Correction for summary

[jmac_the_man]

The full formal name of the game depicted in the FIFA games is "Association Football." This name is often shortened (depending on locale) to either "football" or "soccer." The name of the game comes from the fact that it's played "on foot" unlike polo, which is played "on horseback." (The implication was that soccer is a game for poor people, too poor to own their own horse.)

The NFL sanctions games in a sport called "Gridiron Football," which is also commonly shortened to football. The name comes from the fact that the oblong ball was historically 12 inches (one foot) long, when measured tip to tip. (The size of the ball was changed to the modern 11.5 inches in the 1930s to make the forward pass easier.)