Fortnite Teen Hackers 'Earning Thousands of Dollars a Week' (bbc.com) 42
Children as young as 14 are making thousands of pounds a week as part of a global hacking network built around the popular video game Fortnite. From a report: About 20 hackers told the BBC they were stealing the private gaming accounts of players and reselling them online. Fortnite is free to play but is estimated to have made more than 1bn pound ($1.25) through the sale of "skins", which change the look of a character, and other add-ons. This fuels a growing black market. Hackers can sell player accounts for as little as 25p or hundreds of pounds, depending on what they contain. The items are collected as in-game purchases but are purely cosmetic and do not give gamers any extra abilities. Fortnite-maker Epic declined to comment on the investigation but said it was working to improve account security. The game has more than 200 million players.
Devaluation of the British pound (Score:5, Funny)
is estimated to have made more than 1bn pound ($1.25)
Yikes! I didn't realize that Brexit had such an impact on the British economy. Or that Fortnight had only turned a buck twenty-five in profit. Must be Hollywood accounting.
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Still $1.25 US = 1 British Pound is not great, back pre-prexit it was $1.70 US for Pound. Then it dropped right after the Brexit vote.
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No, the summary clearly states that 1,000,000,000 British Pounds = $1.25 US.
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penis (Score:1, Funny)
Easy Marks (Score:5, Interesting)
You'd have to be pretty stupid to buy an account as well, especially if everyone in the game knows that there are loads of people getting their accounts stolen. Digital goods are trivial to repossess and restore to the original owner.
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I guess if they were unscrupulous enough to go to a Fortnite cheating page, they probably deserve to get ripped off.
Online game cheating, really is just scum of the earth type of stuff. If I wanted to play a game, and I get bested because someone was better then me or just lucky, then I take it as is. I just need to practice more, if I want to get better. However if someone is cheating then that just runes the fun for everyone. Because we are not getting bested due to things we can improve, we are bested b
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Online cheating page scams have been around UO and Everquest. The fact that people on FN are getting hit by this isn't surprising. Most likely the accounts will get banned, which gets Epic Games more cash, as people have to get new accounts and re-buy their new Tomato-head skin.
Valve likely makes money hand over fist with VAC bans, as people will happily re-buy all their games on the account.
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Per the article summary the changes are purely cosmetic, so they're not going to be better than you because they bought a premade character... they're just going to have less common clothing on.
Not defending hacking, stealing, or online cheating... but in this case their account theft is merely for cosmetics.
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No actual hacking was involved. (Score:2)
Earning? (Score:3)
Fortnite Teen Hackers 'Earning Thousands of Dollars a Week'
Earning? No. Reaping? Yes.
Come on Editors, let's see some understanding and nuance.
sale of "skins", (Score:2)
I guess a sucker is born every fortnight
Stealing, not earning (Score:4, Insightful)
That is what they mean when they say economics is not a zero-sum game. The value of the possessions of both sides in a valid economic transaction (a trade) increases, even if no new stuff is created. Both of you have "earned" something valuable from the trade. (This is also why capitalism beats out communism. In capitalism, each individual determines what things they value, and they make trades according to what they value. In communism, someone else determines the value of things for everyone, and distributes the things to the individuals. Communism works to a point, but beyond that point capitalism is better able to fine-tune trades to better match each individual's peculiar wants and needs.)
Stealing is nearly always zero or negative sum. One side loses exactly what the other side gains. Or one side loses more than the other side gains (usually if there was some property destruction in the process). What the people in TFA are doing is stealing, not earning. They're not creating anything of value, and in fact are destroying net value by forcing the victims to waste time going through an account retrieval process, and forcing Epic to expend additional resources to help with account retrieval.
(Why "nearly always"? You'll also notice that in cases like a spiteful rich guy purposefully refusing to sell life-saving medication, stealing the medicine actually becomes positive sum. The rich guy loses medicine which doesn't benefit him so its value is only what it cost him to acquire or create. But the medicine's value is a life to you, so is considerably more than what it cost the rich guy to acquire or create. So stealing the medicine actually results in a net positive economic transaction even though one side loses in the transaction. This sort of situation usually crops up when a person or company has a monopoly, and is the reason anti-trust regulation exists. It actually benefits society more to force the monopoly holder to sell at a price lower than they would like, or break up their monopoly so competition forces them to sell at a lower price. Government-created monopolies like copyright holders, Epi-pen manufacturers, and cable companies should take note here - the fact that their monopoly was granted by the government does not imply permission to abuse their monopoly in any manner their wish. The moment their antics cost society more than the value of what they're selling, the rationale for granting them a monopoly vanishes.)
The more things change... (Score:2)
We'll know security has crossed the Rubicon when a popular online game implements support for a hardware token for login at launch, instead of waiting years to do it like Blizzard did for World of Warcraft.
Producing a sufficiently ubiquitous hardware token is the hard part. Smartphones seem the obvious candidate, but so far only Samsung and Apple seem very serious about integrating secure enclave chips, and precious little uses them outside of the OS itself.
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Free to play... (Score:2)
Re: Free to play... (Score:2)