How private investigators tracked down a Modern Warfare 2 pirate

VentureBeat tells the story of how private investigators used the Internet trail of cyber thieves to track down a pirate who got hold of early disks for Modern Warfare 2, the biggest game of the year.

[TheHater]

How can someone be a pirate for having the disk early? The purchase the game at retailers that broke the street date. Does these idiot know what it means to pirate software?

[Elven6]

Didn't you read the article? They stole a crate of MW2 stuff and,

A. Were selling it (this in itself can cause trouble for the sellers)
B. Buyers and possibly sellers were planning on pirating the game

If you have something you stole and plan on selling it that is illegal, if you are a buyer and you buy something that is stolen but don't know it was stolen you won't get in trouble. Everyone here knew it was stolen and even talked about publicly pirating the game once they bought it.

[LONEWOLF231]

Pssshhh.............lol

ARREST HIM!!!

That man is selling a legal copy of MW2!
For all you know he got it the legal way but since its not suppose to be released till the 10th we will just make up a stupid story so we can detain him and pacify the masses.

SO there you have it, They (according to them) broke open a crate and "STOLE" the item.

[joydestroy]

and if you read even further, the article says that the dude was making pirated copies of the game and selling them. he deserved to be caught because he was stupid. an email addy used matched a facebook account lol. how dumb can you be, really???

[Montrealien]

Having the copy early and playing it is not a problem, profiting from it is. I know, I am in the business, I can play the game all I want if I recieve it early, as long as I don;t sell it, or go and rip it to pirate it.

I am glad they caught the f***er, I hate thieves.

[Killjoy3000]

Why does it seem that just because this is such a high profile game and that they're cracking down on it strictly because of the significance of the brand in the industry? Did Activision just send a bunch of ninjas out there? I'm pretty sure these "private investigators," couldn't give a hoot if these guys got Two Worlds early. Jesus christ, I cannot stand it when a game stands strictly on hype alone. It's like a form of advertising, and the strongest at that.

Word of mouth will push this game over 10 million units for sure.

[ReBurn]

TheHater clearly didn't read the article. There were people who admitted to stealing bundles that they tried to sell on Craigslist. And the one dude was in business with an underground hologram maker and was making pirate copies of the game that looked like legit copies.

[the worst]

i have a pirate copy come get me

[Gandalf]

This is the day you will always remember as the day that you almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow!

[va_bank]

LMAO - bubbles!

[ThisPlaceSucksBye]

Good one LOL!

[FiftyFourPointTwo]

Nice. XD

[dkblackhawk50]

Perfect quote for this article.

[Bloodshedder]

i get the joke, but its not even funny, good attempt though

[PoisonedTea]

I'm confused. Why would Gandalf refer to himself as Captain Jack Sparrow?

....I'm lolling all over the place :)

[qwertyuiopasdfghjkl]

I'm sick and tired of the The Man cracking down on honest thieves like the one in this article.

All the planning, all the dry runs, the blood, sweat and tears that go into swindling these big corporations, just to make out with enough money to pay for next months Porsche payment...

I miss not having any self respect or values... I'd be ridonkulously rich right now...

Of course I'd probably be serving a few years in the pen for unrelated incidents...

[kaveti6616]

Capitalism allows businessmen to be thieves in a legal function.

My mother needed to have an ambulance come and pick her up and take her to the hospital after she got Salmonella poisoning. The hospital was only 3 miles from the apartment. Do you know how much they charged her for just that ambulance ride? $951.00 These people who steal games, I frown upon their behavior, but you know what? I feel less anger towards them than I do at the fat cats who think they can charge one grand for an ambulance ride.

[ReBurn]

It isn't capitalism that causes that ambulance ride to be so expensive. Capitalism implies that there's competition for her business, which more often than not isn't. That ambulance is more than likely a function of your local government, much like firemen and police officers. If it was a private ambulance service and not one dispatched by an emergency call to a 911 operator then caveat emptor.

Anything medical is expensive mostly due to the people who pay their medical bills having to pay for the people who don't.

[kaveti6616]

Sure Reburn. When people call 911 in my state they don't get an option to be picked up by a private bus or a government funded one. And Capitalism gives people the right to charge whatever they want for their services as long as their prices remain competitive and their customers remain willing and able. So my mom is able to pay the bill (even though we're lower middle class), and at the time when she was throwing up and was afraid she was going to die, she was willing to pay whatever cost to get to the hospital. That's how capitalism in the healthcare INDUSTRY works. If you think Capitalism is not to blame, then good for you. I'm not trying to convince anyone that it sucks overall. But it does have negatives, just like every other economic system. Look at who's complaining about universal healthcare and look at who's a proponent of it. It's pretty cut and dry.

[Captain Tuttle]

Is your Mom OK?

[M_Prime]

i'm glad i'm in canada, an ambulance ride here is like $90, and the rest is paid by the government and my work has benifits too so they pay the $90. i don't understand why some americans are against universal healthcare, yes the taxes go up a bit but when you get sick you don't worry about how much it will cost you or if you can even afford to see the dr. I just go.. recently my dad spent about 3 to 4 months in the hospital and when he came out they sent a nurse out and gave him all the supplies he needed for in home care. i don't think we paid a penny for anything and he was in intensive care for a good majority of the time with a nurse watching him 24/7

[FantasyStar]

This basically proves what idiot pirates are if they USED FACEBOOK.

I said this time and time again. Social apps like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace reveal far too much info when used recklessly. 2 things the pirate could've done to avoid this.

1. A Buyer on Craigslist who offers more than asking price is clearly a flag to be wary about.
2. Using Facebook or any social app in conjunction with known Craigslist aliases is asking to get caught.

Only the idiot pirate got caught. The real ones are still at large. I like this last part. "When you use the Internet, you always leave tracks somewhere.”"

-Yeah? If that's so then why are hackers still at large? I'll tell you. Oh wait, no I won't. =D

[Redempteur]

maybe it wasn't a real pirate ?

This moves was just to dissuade people who leak things early ... but it won't have much effet i'm afraid .. all 360 games came before the release date ...you won't stop this easily ..

[Kushan]

Quite a bit of this article doesn't actually add up. For a start, it has the dates completely wrong with when MW2 was "leaked" online - it says it happened monday of this week but I happen to know it was more like thursday/friday of last week.

Further more, it says the guy "cracked the code" of the game to pirate it? Uhhh, no, to copy a 360 game you put it in a special drive (Which can be a standard 360 drive from any 360 - or you can get them online for about $20) and press one button on a piece of software. That's it, its easier than copying a DVD film, no "cracking" involved.

Finally, it say she was selling 250Gb Western Digital HDDs (The HDDs you use to make custom/unofficial 360 Hard Drives) "loaded with 125 games" - that's an utter fabrication, you can't pirate 360 games like that. All marketplace stuff is still locked down, the only thing that you can pirate is Game disks - and the only way you can pirate them is to burn to blank DVDs, plus they're often between 6 and 8GB in Size, not the 2GB the article implies.

While I'm sure there's quite a lot of truth in this article, it has clearly been very poorly researched so its credibility dropped quite a bit for me.

[IdleLeeSiuLung]

....

[Darkspade]

I think what they were saying is that he was Selling a 250gb Hard Drive with 125 Xbox 360 ISO files,

[Kushan]

That still doesn't make sense, each 360 ISO is like 7Gb, you'd barely fit more than 40 or 50 on a 250Gb drive. They're definitely not 2GB each!

[Jamescagney]

The shadowy world of the pirate. Be careful where you tread, lest you fall to their wicked spell. Ooh ah.

[MGRogue2017]

.. Now pirates know what to do in order to hide themselves from this happening to them.

Well done.. lol

[menoyou]

A rehash with outated graphics, crappy single player, and published by Satan himself... the biggest game of the year? lolno

[Caffo01]

i agree with you...only thing i'd like to point out is that i liked MW1 single player..a lot short but nice!
anyway this game should have been an expansion of MW1..and biggest game of the year? LOL

[JonnyBigBoss]

Piracy is lame.

[Jamescagney]

And drugs are bad m'kay.

[Campy da Camper]

BUT...There is a point where "capitalism" turns into "bend you over and dry hump you like Spielberg and Lucas did to Indiana Jones in that South Park episode".

I'm not a huge PC gamer but a lot of my frineds are. They are getting the shaft after years of progression and TOTAL brand loyalty.

I will not condone pirating this game but I must admit I smirck inside when I read that others are doing anything they can to shaft the dev and more importantly, BOBBY.

Cheers

[djfullshred]

This is a lame argument when people try to use "the big companies screw us" as a reason for stealing. So you don't like gas prices, you have the right to steal from the local gas station. You don't like that the grocer raised the price of milk - ok to steal it now. Taxes went up. OK, now that justifies cheating the government & rest of the taxpayers.

If you are a thief, don't makeup lame justifications for illegal activity. It is just ignorant sounding.

[rob6021]

I'm sure Activision is happy to get all the law enforcement involved from Dallas to go after this guy instead of real criminals. Oh no the precious 'street date' was broken... It's not like Activi$ion lost anymore than one copy of MW2 here, in reality.

Activision should be pissed at Microsoft, not this kid- They went with DVD and tried to convince everyone DVD was good enough for this gen. No let's get mad at the pirates and forget how vulnerable Microsoft left it's rushed console open to pirates in the first place.

[Jamescagney]

That's just a stupid way of looking at it. They can go the DVD way and still sell a ton, DVD has nothing to do with it really. They will make more out of DVD copies than they will Blu-ray, and that's a fact, even with piracy.

[Caffo01]

i wouldn't be so sure...with all those 360 pirates!!:P

(don't bash me now..the only i said 360 because ps3 has not been hacked yet)

[Elven6]

DVD has nothing to do with it...Blu Ray is piratable as well, the PS3 to my knowledge however is not mod chip capable yet in a sense that you can play pirated games on it.

[Jamescagney]

I would say that ps3 piracy is pretty much non-existant, and if it was available, who would want a 25 gb download, or more?

[ReBurn]

Somebody wants them, considering there are tons of Blu-ray movie torrents out there. Hard drive capacity is cheap, so some folks just run the movies right off of their drives.

[Jamescagney]

I'm talking about games though, not movies. Games will be far larger than movie files.

[Elven6]

A game on a 25GB Blu Ray disc would be the same as a movie on a 25GB disc, same goes for 50GB. While size may deter some, pirates simply want things for free so size may not stop many of them.

Also factor in that not all games take up 25, 50, etc GB, compression can also be used. In other words, pirates will find a way around everything. :(

[Darkspade]

I was watching this unfold on that web site... The Funny part was the Forum Members had posted this guy house on google maps image..
They had found this off his iPhone Photo's... It's funny to see these
Investigators go through so much to catch someone, when 13-** years old people can pin point this guy in 3 hours.. It was Great, they thought he had posted a Fake Link and they pretty much push this guy to the Wolfs... Good Times

[AliTheBrit19]

Lol Goddamn..

I just got a little more paranoid

[artsaber]

For the simple fact that you cannot buy a PC nowadays without a DVD burner. Blank DVDs are DIRT cheap... even the Verbatim DL ones from Singapore that everyone uses to burn 360 copies. Bluray burners are RARE and expensive, blank Bluray media is too expensive to burn coasters with... and the ripping software is still unproven in the mod community, whereas there is a screenshot picture play-by-play tutorial on about 50 websites on how to rip/burn 360 games with free software.

Most people just download a pre-cracked torrent for 360 games anyhow. They just do a SFV check to make sure the files are good and check the .ISO stealth. As long as a hacker doesn't play the game online before the release date and doesn't draw attention to himself, he will never get caught.

DVD has a mod community support, the burners are a modern standard, the media is cheap... it actually PAYS to pirate 360 DVD games, you can afford to burn 5 or 6 coasters and still come out cheaper.

Bluray is just the opposite, Bluray burners are NOT standard, you CANNOT afford to burn coasters since the media ain't cheap, so it doesn't pay to burn Blurays just yet. The burner and the media is too costly right now, Bluray burning is currently unattractive to the average user. It will come around in the future.

[Elven6]

People run pirated games, homebrew, etc off harddrives as well cutting out the need for physical media in a sense.

[Persistantthug]

If you remember, the cost of CD's and the burners were expensive back in the mid 90's, but just as everything else electronic, those prices went down faster and faster. Same with DVD.

So while the cost of the medium is a type of deterrent for the time being, it won't be for long.....it never is.

[foreverflame]

I heard the guy was a ps3 owner.all ps3 owners pirate video game look at the worthless psp.

[electricshadow]

omg lol. Just...ugh, I don't even know where to start with you. You used to be a good troll and now it's just pathetic. Did you even read the article? Let me copy and paste this one part of it to show how big of an idiot you are. "Someone was selling a Modern Warfare 2 Xbox 360 bundle". LOLFAIL.

[The Iron Sheik]

You really don't put much thought into your posts do you?

I'm not even going to bother debunking your ridiculous statement everyone here already knows how full of s**t you and your bot buddies are.

[Redgehammer]

the one thing I gleaned from the article is that even if you are smart you can still be stupid.

[SaxScrotumz]

What a loser...

[Cliff Forster]

Its simply amazing to me that there is a big market for overpaying a week before release?

[Uzesgelen_Goo]

@Headline

[iforgotmylogin]

lol that website anyone coulda did that. they made it seem like they ip tracked this notorious hacker and found out through all of his schemes and etc when really they just called the guy and caught him in a typical drug dealing trap. lol and good for him

activisions money wasted on all this piracy catching things is so much. lol

[keysy420]

i dont get it

[Zikron]

Don't pirate games on a large scale! Then you won't get caught :)

From the last paragraph of the article: "If you try to do piracy on a large scale, you will get caught."

[terrorofdeath]

When the article said "They conducted a buy-bust sting where Del Amo had sent a “runner” to make the exchange."

I immediately had thoughts of Mirror's Edge. :D

[Rixynator]

let's see how their crack down all the pirates in Asia cause I would love to see that.