“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.
According to Agent Thompson, here’s how the scheme evolved:
In 2003, a computer user in China obtained the “Lineage” source code from an unprotected website. The proprietary code was then placed on the underground market, where a Texas man, among others, bought it in 2004. He then passed it along to his business partner in California, who set up a website,
www.l2extreme.com, to offer the “Lineage” game at a discount. Gamers arrived in droves—as many as 50,000 active users by 2006—which pinched the legitimate game’s bottom line.
“It’s comparable to the music-downloading and file-sharing problem in the late ‘90s—thousands of people engaging in activity that is inherently illegal,” Agent Thompson said.
The California man soon assumed full control of the site and ramped up operations. In late 2005, just months after promising to shut down the site, he rented more powerful servers—enough to accommodate 4,000 simultaneous gamers. He solicited donations from users to help defray the costs and collected more than $25,000 in less than two days.
