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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.
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.
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. . . .
"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.)