Cracking The Code

fbi.gov, Mar 07, 2007

It must have seemed like the perfect scheme—buy the stolen source code of a popular online game, rent some servers to run the game as your own, and then hang a shingle on the web inviting gamers to come play at a steep discount.

A California man who followed that path must have thought he’d never get caught. He was even warned once by the game’s rightful owner, a large South Korean company, to shut down. He didn’t.

“They don’t think that a company is going to come after them at any point,” says Christopher Thompson, a special agent on a cyber squad in the FBI’s office in Austin, Texas. “He said he was going to stop doing it and he didn’t.”

So the company, which has offices in Austin, called the FBI. The suspect was apparently lining his own pockets from “donations” and ads on his site while his pirated version of the game, “Lineage II,” was siphoning $750,000 a month in potential revenues from the company. Read more at fbi.gov.