Hello, welcome to the Tuesday, November 15th, 2016 edition of the Sands and Storms and a Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, and I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Years ago, one of the big ways how criminals made money was gold farming, which meant that they dealt in virtual goods in particular in games like

World of Warcraft and often stole those goods by for example prude-forcing users' accounts.

Well it looks like this scheme is sort of back a little bit with the latest versions of the

FIFA soccer game. Turns out that in this game

if you're playing matches that you'll be credited points that you can then later use in order

to transfer them into the game's internal currency. You can also buy the internal currency and exchange them

among users.

Well, in this case, the individuals were actually writing a script that was essentially

playing or faking to play games by doing so.

They accumulated large amounts of points in the game which they then cashed out

by selling them to other players.

The FBI now released an indictment charging at least one individual here with wire fraud.

Amazing how profitable it was, he made a few million dollars in this

scheme. One bank account alone was $2.8 million. A lot of fancy cars and such got confiscated as well.

Of course, anti-automation is always a very tricky task trying to prevent scripts

from using your APIs or your game. Now, in this particular case, was pointed out that

electronic arts did try to implement various countermeasures in order to prevent the scripts

from running, but apparently these individuals

were good enough, they were able to bypass the countermeasures that electronic arts implemented.

Another issue that made it difficult for the companies involved here was that apparently

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