The FBI believes that a group of hackers made millions off a scam to defraud the publisher Electronic Arts, and today the government is going to court to try to take them down.
This morning in Texas, defendant Anthony Clark will go on trial for conspiracy to commit wire fraud after allegedly working with three other hackers to mine FIFA coins from EA’s servers, then sell those coins to “black market” dealers in Europe and China. The FBI alleges that Clark and his co-defendants made between $15 and $18 million off this scheme.
FIFA coins are the controversial in-game currency of EA’s popular soccer series, used to buy player packs within FIFA games. You can earn FIFA coins either by playing matches or spending real money to buy them in the game. They’re also very popular in the third-party marketplace; a cursory google search for “FIFA coins” will bring up nothing but third-party sellers, including an entire subreddit dedicated solely to trading coins.
According to an unsealed FBI indictment, Clark and his co-defendants allegedly built a tool that would send false signals to EA’s servers to spoof matches, generating these FIFA coins at a rapid rate. The FBI alleges that Clark and crew then sold the coins to third-party sellers, earning millions. The alleged scheme began at some point in 2013 (“exact date unknown”) and continued until September 17, 2015, when the FBI began seizing property and investigating this case.
Read the full article here: http://kotaku.com/man-goes-on-trial-for-allegedly-stealing-millions-from-1788948231
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