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Fortnite Teen Hackers 'Earning Thousands of Dollars a Week' (bbc.com)
Children as young as 14 are making thousands of pounds a week as part of a global hacking network built around the popular video game Fortnite. From a report: About 20 hackers told the BBC they were stealing the private gaming accounts of players and reselling them online. Fortnite is free to play but is estimated to have made more than 1bn pound ($1.25) through the sale of "skins", which change the look of a character, and other add-ons. This fuels a growing black market. Hackers can sell player accounts for as little as 25p or hundreds of pounds, depending on what they contain. The items are collected as in-game purchases but are purely cosmetic and do not give gamers any extra abilities. Fortnite-maker Epic declined to comment on the investigation but said it was working to improve account security. The game has more than 200 million players.
is estimated to have made more than 1bn pound ($1.25)
Yikes! I didn't realize that Brexit had such an impact on the British economy. Or that Fortnight had only turned a buck twenty-five in profit. Must be Hollywood accounting.
> more than 1bn pound ($1.25)
1bn pounds is only $1.25? Yay Brexit.
penis
I'm guessing that there's almost no hacking going on. The easiest way accounts get stolen for a game like this is for some unscrupulous individuals to create a fan site (or even something more shady like a cheat site) that requires an account to access the site. Since most people have abysmal security practices, they reuse the same password.
You'd have to be pretty stupid to buy an account as well, especially if everyone in the game knows that there are loads of people getting their accounts stolen. Digital goods are trivial to repossess and restore to the original owner.
Merry Christmas, dear fortnite hackers! Buy something nice for your loved ones from the $$$ :)
... are a bunch of theives. In the old days in the 90's kids could cheat on dedicated servers because they owned and controlled the game. The game industry takes these kids money and doesn't give them a copy of the game which is drm'd to hell and back. The biggest scam going are these f2p games that prey on stupid kids and people who have no idea how technology works.
"Hacking" is just there to make you click. It hasn't ment diddly squat for at least a decade now.
Except that it gets msmash all hot and bothered, of course.
Rather than, people who take advantage of morons?
That would allow both of those parties to step back and take a look at themselves.
My kid got his roblox account stolen. He wanted unlimited roblox so he found a website that promised him unlimited roblox. When he signed up he used the same user name and password he used for everything else he was 8 he didn't know any better. The people that stole it used to sell in game t-shirts or something like that. All I know is that after jumping through a ton of hoops he was in game rich when he got his account back.
Fortnite Teen Hackers 'Earning Thousands of Dollars a Week'
Earning? No. Reaping? Yes.
Come on Editors, let's see some understanding and nuance.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
June 23, 2016 the date of the vote for Brexit. 1 Pound = $1.37.
Of course what would you expect from the idiot that told me running unedited video of your election opponent giving a political speech is voter suppression and should end you up in jail.
Fact check every thing a liberal/progressive tells you. If it can be objectively checked, it will be a lie.
Story proving Clinton paid the Russians to challenge the election in case she lost. Perhaps you should ask her or her supporters instead of Trump supporters.
I guess a sucker is born every fortnight
...the teen hackers bragged about how much ass they tapped last weekend (15), how many beers they drank this morning (54), and just how high they were right now (like, dude)
"Earning" implies a proper economic transaction. When both sides agree to an economic exchange, it's because it benefits both parties. If you're a dairy cow farmer and your refrigerator is full of bottles of milk, so you crave eggs. Meanwhile your neighbor the chicken farmer has a refrigerator full of eggs he craves milk. So the two of you agree to exchange some milk for eggs. The value (to you) of items you possess (milk + eggs) has increased because you gave away some "worthless" milk to receive "valuable" eggs. The value (to him) of items your neighbor possesses (eggs + milk) has increased because he gave away some "worthless" eggs to receive "valuable" milk. So the net value of both your possessions has increased even though the total amount of eggs + milk in the system remains exactly the same.
That is what they mean when they say economics is not a zero-sum game. The value of the possessions of both sides in a valid economic transaction (a trade) increases, even if no new stuff is created. Both of you have "earned" something valuable from the trade. (This is also why capitalism beats out communism. In capitalism, each individual determines what things they value, and they make trades according to what they value. In communism, someone else determines the value of things for everyone, and distributes the things to the individuals. Communism works to a point, but beyond that point capitalism is better able to fine-tune trades to better match each individual's peculiar wants and needs.)
Stealing is nearly always zero or negative sum. One side loses exactly what the other side gains. Or one side loses more than the other side gains (usually if there was some property destruction in the process). What the people in TFA are doing is stealing, not earning. They're not creating anything of value, and in fact are destroying net value by forcing the victims to waste time going through an account retrieval process, and forcing Epic to expend additional resources to help with account retrieval.
(Why "nearly always"? You'll also notice that in cases like a spiteful rich guy purposefully refusing to sell life-saving medication, stealing the medicine actually becomes positive sum. The rich guy loses medicine which doesn't benefit him so its value is only what it cost him to acquire or create. But the medicine's value is a life to you, so is considerably more than what it cost the rich guy to acquire or create. So stealing the medicine actually results in a net positive economic transaction even though one side loses in the transaction. This sort of situation usually crops up when a person or company has a monopoly, and is the reason anti-trust regulation exists. It actually benefits society more to force the monopoly holder to sell at a price lower than they would like, or break up their monopoly so competition forces them to sell at a lower price. Government-created monopolies like copyright holders, Epi-pen manufacturers, and cable companies should take note here - the fact that their monopoly was granted by the government does not imply permission to abuse their monopoly in any manner their wish. The moment their antics cost society more than the value of what they're selling, the rationale for granting them a monopoly vanishes.)
Why you lie? Clinton paid Christopher Steel to write the dossier, he said he used the money to pay Russians to give him info. The guy paid by Clinton said she paid him to pay for Russian information.
I've heard liberalism is a mental disorder, but didn't agree with that statement. This last few weeks I can't argue against it. We literally have the guy who paid the Russians with Clinton's money saying he did, and you are saying it didn't happen. Were you the Russian being paid and lied to Steele?
We'll know security has crossed the Rubicon when a popular online game implements support for a hardware token for login at launch, instead of waiting years to do it like Blizzard did for World of Warcraft.
Producing a sufficiently ubiquitous hardware token is the hard part. Smartphones seem the obvious candidate, but so far only Samsung and Apple seem very serious about integrating secure enclave chips, and precious little uses them outside of the OS itself.
Who the HELL pays money for skins? My daughter got her Microsoft Live account cancelled for buying loot boxes without permission...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
People. And video games. Everything that's wrong with your civilization. But no worries, we're on our way to rid your planet of the human virus.
Life's too short to be wasting time playing video gaymez. FAGS.