Police bust 'biggest' video-game-cheat operation | Hacker News Reader

Police bust 'biggest' video-game-cheat operation

bbc.com

13 pointsmindracer39 comments

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> Cheating is literally ruining gaming and large companies like Tencent know it.

> Interested in gaming? See our other gaming articles this week: "China's Tencent revenues surge thanks to gaming boom"

> Cheating is literally ruining gaming and large companies like Tencent know it.

Really poor writing for a BBC journalist.

Fwiw, I doubt a BBC journalist wrote that sentence (despite satisfying modern standards).

It is not just the literally bit. It's that it is just an opinion, but written as a fact. It is as bad as a high school report.

It boggles the mind that anyone considers this worth calling the police on.

It's actually quite reasonable if you think about it from a financial perspective.

Company makes game, their intellectual property. Someone else makes a cheat and makes a lot of money destroying their IP, causing them to lose money as players decide the game "has too many cheaters".

Obviously gaming companies do try to employ technical solutions to the problem, but I would guess this outfit got so large simply by being ignored.

My question would be what are the actual laws that the cheat makers have broken, at best they violated the ToS of the game. The arguement would be similar then with lockpicking tools if a company created a lockpick that was specifically designed to use against the locks that are manufactured by the by some specific brand.

In the UK, the computer misuse act is extremely broad and in theory covers a huge amount of stuff. I’m not familiar with the equivalent rules in china.

It's my understanding that they're being charged with laws that are same as hacking a company server. I'm sure Chinese law works different than Westerners are used to.

I have a harder time wrapping my head around this after your comment. I get that police are there to protect corporate profits, so it makes sense in that way. The IP stance though, is this precedent that if you are a large corporation, the game laws you make are then enforceable in the real world?

It does really blow my mind that makers of software that people buy and run on their own machines are going to get locked in a cage because they were undermining a game's design.

I've actually had some respect for China's treatment of intellectual property, as I believe a looser IP policy allows for faster innovation in society. This is just enforcing corporate interests though, it's not the world I want to see and it's going to take some very talented developers and reverse engineers out of the job market.

Using cheat software is a breach of the terms of service. The cheaters are welcome to do wtf they want with their computer, but they should not be allowed to abuse a service.

And it ruins the day for for millions of people who just want to enjoy the game.

This can't be the reasoning. That is breach of contract and therefore a civil case (unless it's different in Germany?). Companies do not write laws, ergo breaching a company's terms is not criminal.

At least in the US I would not be surprised if breaking authentication handshakes and taking unwanted copies of game memory space is CFAA/DMCA felony.

I anal, but have previously done both cheat and anticheat as a kid.

Apologies, I mean China. Don't know why I said Germany but I can't edit my comment.

No worries, I get them confused all the time. Very similar places.

But the question is why the proper legal route isn't the civil system instead of getting law enforcement involved to arrest them.

In the US, I think a company's only route would be a lawsuit, if the only thing going on was game cheating and ToS violation. Though I could be wrong.

IANAL but if they previously did bring a lawsuit and the cheaters continued in violation of court orders, the police could be brought in for that.

Say it went the route you're suggesting, what should the next step be, if the people in question ignore the court's verdict? It the follows the question: how do you know it didn't already go this route?

This already is taken into consideration in the normal US legal process. If you totally ignore it, the judge issues a warrant for asset seizure and/or arrest.

There's no indication in the article that anything like this happened here. But that's not surprising or interesting, because there's no real rule of law or due process in China. The government and anyone in their favor just completely annihilates anyone they deem undesirable.

The cheat creators are benefitting from breaking the game and selling their cheats to 1. normal consumers 2. esports professionals.

Because of the cheats, the game creators need to patch them out, create detection tools and generally invest more resources into the game, which obviously costs and drops profits. If they don't, the game is dead.

The cheat creators are basically holding a gun to the game developers' head.

> The cheat creators are basically holding a gun to the game developers' head.

This is hyperbole. Every other sport has its cheaters and they manage the problem without getting the cops involved.

At least in case of the German doping scandals, police was very heavily involved, e.g.:

https://www.welt.de/sport/article189528515/Doping-Beben-Dies...

(related English article, not a translation of the first link: https://www.dw.com/en/doping-probe-of-german-doctor-leads-to...)

The matter you have linked to is a criminal matter that relates to the practice of medicine.

It is important to differentiate between criminal and civil matters. Police should only be involved in criminal matters, and should never be act as the agent of a party in civil disputes.

The matter of video cheating appears to be a civil matter.

On this forum of all places, we must be wary of legislative creep towards vague wording such as "the misapplication of computer systems from their intended purpose". At that point, the police will be deployed at the behest of well-connected interests. In practice, it will mean that the system will be used to beat up hackers at the direction of bigco, even for petty matters when it serves to make an example.

We have already seen this play out in the Swartz and Aleynikov trials: matters that were civil disputes by any reasonable reading, but which were executed as criminal matters (in one case, even after the plaintiff had withdrawn).

See my other comment above. The "organization" in question is (most likely) an illegal business which didn't pay taxes. This is almost certainly a "criminal matter" in most countries, police get involved all the time when it comes to illegal business practices, at the least the police is doing searches and arrests.

This isn't the old type of harmless "crackers and warez groups" scene, but first and foremost about making money.

PS: I wonder if commenters here think that Tencent is sending police after the people using those cheats? It's clearly about the organization producing and selling the cheats. The players will at most get a simple ban.

Both this comment and your earlier comment appear to be speculation.

Above you said they did not pay taxes, but now you seem less sure. Why?

What is your evidence?

It's my speculation in this specific case, but that's how such "companies" usually work, they are highly professional in every aspect except for being an actually registered company - because then they could be "legally dealt with", depending on the country they operate from of course (I've been on the other side for the last 10 years working on an MMO, and having to deal with professional-quality commercial bots is unfortunately a constant "background distraction" for us).

Thanks for the context regarding your experience in a related domain.

Still, in your comments you have been presenting speculation as fact. Please don't do that.

I think a lot of malware also gets installed whilst pretending to be something for cheating. Developers don’t want their brand associated with that.

That's pretty far removed from "cheating warrants a police bust".

Why is this mind boggling? It's an illegal business that made millions in revenue without paying taxes.

If the "organization" would have been a legal company which sold "addon services" for those games, Tencent would have most likely sent their lawyers after them instead of the police. Right tool for the right job, basically ;)

that makes no sense. is it "illegal business" if you dont pay taxes and if a cheater does pay 100% taxes on the gains, does that make it "legal"? i am sure taxes should have nothing to do with the intent with which the income is earned.

>Kunshan police found and destroyed 17 cheats and arrested 10 people in connection with the ring.

How do they destroy cheats?

rm -rf /

sudo !!

These cheats often phone home for operation, destroy the servers and they won't work

Pretty much this, it's a massive "criminals don't trust criminals" thing. I've seen numerous cheats have hardware blacklists that remote-wipe people they dislike, phone home with ludicrous amounts of PII to disincentivise account sharing or key sharing, attempting to reverse engineer a "private cheat" might result in the uploading of your computer, etc.

The fact the BBC calls it a criminal enterprise [1] is bullshit, it is not criminal.

If it's tied directly to professional sport fraud or copyright infringement or anything criminal then the BBC needs to show proof. Or if they want to be hipster and refer to local laws then make sure they refer to sodomy as criminal enterprise when talking about Saudi Arabia.

Video here - http://www.chinanews.com/chinanews/content.jsp?id=9441884&cl...

It seems it was for -

"At present, He Moumou, Wang Moumou and others are suspected of providing intrusion and illegal control of computer information system programs and tools."

[1] "What used to be a cottage industry of hackers exposing glitches in the code of games has now become a massive criminal enterprise."

Yes, I found the piece problematic, too. It surprised me that BBC could publish an uncritical, highly sensational article like this one. No question asked about the legal basis of the operation, nor provided any in-depth background information. It reads like a tabloid story.

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