Japanese police are pressing charges against a trio of teenagers for the odious crime of cheating in an online game, the nation’s first ever for this outrageous offence, after MapleStory publisher Nexon fingered them as thieving hackers.
Three youths aged 17-18 – a university student living in Fukushima, a highschooler from Nara and a technical college student from Tokushima prefecture – allegedly used cheating tools to power up their weapons and obtain fee-based items for free in an online game.
The company managing the games they cheated at – Nexon, best known for MapleStory and Mabinogi – took a dim view of this and had police charge them with a slew of hacking charges.
Police say this is the first time they have prosecuted anyone for cheating at a game, and Nexon has vowed eternal war on cheaters, saying “We dealt with this strictly before, and we’ll grapple with illicit activity as aggressively as possible from now on as well.”
Police also accuse the schoolboy and university student of coding the tools themselves and then selling them online, saying they netted 8 million yen in sales from the caper.
The trio admit the various charges (or else have been forced to confess as seems to the police’s primary method of securing convictions in technically sophisticated crimes), and for good measure the youth not involved in creating them also confesses “I just used the tools to run rampant and because I wanted to be famous!”
Concern amongst Japanese gamers who might in some way be modifying their gaming experience that they may get arrested is now high – along with the usual questions about just where the priorities of police lie:
“Serves them right!”
“Which game was it anyway?”
“Sudden Attack!”
“Arrested for cheating. How their parents will weep.”
“Unbelievable they would arrest them on trumped up hacking charges for cheating in some game. A warning and ban would suffice. It’s just a game and they must have been smart to pull this off – not like they hurt anyone.”
“The game is nothing special but there are cash prizes for topping the rankings so Nexon are pretty desperate to keep the only appeal it has intact.”
“As far as they are concerned it is like shoplifting. Trying to send a message I suppose.”
“Pretty big news really. To think they’ll arrest people for cheating now.”
“If they can arrest schoolboys for cheating you’d think they might actually arrest the bullies there as well, it would be a better use of their time.”
“We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel with our police these days.”
“Arrest the bot users next!”
“It’s really getting too much seeing the cops bust people for everything but gacha and pachinko!”
“Nexon officially endorses RMT so it is really a case of the pot calling the kettle black here.”
“What is the point of cheating in an online game like this?”
“It’s best to cheat, better than wasting all the time you need to level up on the game in any case!”
“I can’t see many parents letting their kids play online games if they can get themselves arrested in the process… bit of an own goal perhaps?”
“Isn’t it Nexon’s fault for running some garbage code which can be exploited like this in the first place?”
“You can’t really blame a shop for being shoplifted because their shelves did not prevent it!”
“Games filled with people begging police to arrest cheaters are sure to become boring…”
“Keep arresting those cheaters, they ruin it for everyone else!”
| 
Ellen Baker’s Illustrator: “Keep It Clean!”
Bullet Girls 2 Goes At It From All Angles
Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization A Real Grind
Koutetsujou no Kabaneri Immensely Gruesome
Tomoyo After Now on Steam Greenlight
Keiji Inafune Crafts Super Mario Maker Level
Singer Kouji Wada Succumbs to Cancer
Hatsumi Kosaka Bikini Figure
Sankaku App 2.0: Uploading & Editing
New Overwatch Pose Trolls SJWs: “Well Played Blizzard!”
Top 10 Cross-Anime Couples
Strip Fighter 5 Fights Dirty
Netoge no Yome MMORPG Romance Anime
“Official” Signed C.C. Labia Spread Nets $8,000
Sakamoto desu ga The Epitome of Perfection
Anne Happy Anything But Unhappy
Titillating Tomoka Wedding Figure
Touhou Ero-MMD Quite Ravenous
Babymetal Rocks Out On The Late Show
Uniqlo Bra CMs: “Show Us Your Breasts!”
Kashiwazaki Sena Cosplay Pure & Innocent
Minami Kotori Casino Girl Cosplay Takes No Chances
Shimakaze Cosplay by Ema Sakura
Harley Quinn Cosplay by Miyuko Colorfully Crazy
Sonico Ero-Cosplay by Yuka Hoshikage Super Sexy
Kasugano Sora Bunny Girl Cosplay Absolutely Admirable
Goddess of 2ch: “Barely Legal Beauty!”
Highly Yuri Tenryuu & Tatsuta Cosplay by Garo & Usagi
Yuyuko Cosplay by Aimer Lai Truly Enchanting
Tohsaka Rin Ero-Cosplay by Ayane Exceptionally Sexy
No Hack, No Life
Try harder.
Try sucking this dick, then.
You suck your tiny lil' dick.
Mr dick EVERYWHERE !!!
You suck your ladyboy wife's LB-dick.
Thats cuz i cut it into lots of tiny pieces.
Suck your gay dick, sissy.
good news.
Banning sure but police involvement wtf?
Stealing the items which must be paid with $$ is a crime.
Banning is one thing.. but criminal charges! Players should boycott Nexon and let them go down! If one game company gets away with it soon others will follow so the smart thing would be to do is boycott the company and let them go under.
Stealing the net-items without paying for it is still a crime.
Nexon stole shit from me though by banning one of my accounts for no reason. (a hacker that was friends with a mod banned me for killing him)... So I made hacks for their games aswell. Fun thing they are not hard to make for nexon games at all. most of the cheats are just enabling features.
After reading this I'm glad that I stopped playing anything nexon related.
It's civil matter as for their value at most it's questionable.
Thx for admitting your crime, this post has already been forward to Nexon's legal deparment.
Negative votes nean nothing, try harder.
Yes it's a total over reaction a sensible legal system would have told Nexon to fuck off and it's a civil matter.
Oh PLEASE let punishing online douche bags become a thing!
This will only lead to massive amounts of false charges clogging the legal system.
It needs to be restricted to cases where real money was involved, which this case included, and no amount that would be considered mere petty theft.
Though, considering these companies are ripping people off all the time making the game Pay to Win, it's no wonder people are gonna cheat.
@Errantry 11:36 :
"where real money was involved", you say.
If players can pay real money to the game company to get in-game items, then what those people did was financial fraud.
I don't know the Japanese laws on this, but (since, seemingly, nearly everything else is a crime) it's probably illegal, somehow, over there.
And yet criminal scum that jay walk, and don't separate their recyclables are allowed to walk the streets free.
So jay-walkers & trash mushers steal stuff & sell stuff to help others steal. GJ.
I steal from the goverment everytime i jaywalk by not paying for my crimes.
I'm reminded of the .Hack Legend of the Twilight part where a bunch of gamers were hunted down by the "Authorities" becasue they modded some of their items.
My thoughts exaclty. Got an urge to watch .Hack now.
What's the point in hacking an MMO anyway? Whatever happaned to working hard and beating a game without so much as hacking and looking up a guide to take the easy way out?
As I get it there were cash prizes for some events, reason enough for some, and an explanation why they're this strict.
Maplestory is still alive? Game is a shit grind fest. And by grind I don't mean in the traditional RPG since, I mean grind as in whacking the same shitty monsters and watching your XP bar fill up so slowly Christmas will come and you're only a level or two higher. You need to lack a social life to get anywhere.
They upped the xp gain significantly. Recently, a week ago I re-installed Maplestory for the funzies and leveled from 1 to 30 on 3-4 hours. 30 - 49 next day. Atm it's not that hard and the monsters drop a shitton of gold and equipment.
I last played the game about 6 years ago. It was painful. Loved the fractional gain in XP per monster.
better stick to western mmos for your more casual needs, some do enjoy not gaining a level every monster you kill.
Sorry buddy, I just don't find killing the same copy paste, often re skinned monsters dozens of times to gain a level. Especially when the combat system is as basic as basic can be. And the music utterly god awful. A common problem with Korean made MMORPGS is often that they're just copy paste re skinnned editions of another game.
I could count on one hand the number of truly innovative MMORPGs created in the Korea/China region.
The best Nexon game I played for years was Talesweaver. Granted it was in Korean but every character had their own storyline, and each had a boss at the end of each chapter. It's a nice distraction from grinding to follow your characters storyline. Basically yall start off looking the same, for example Lucian, but you can change his hair color, and customise your appearance so you have some sense of individuality.
I just enjoyed the fact perhaps at some points in the story when you trigger a scene, there were some occasions where you had to kill unique shit.
Atlantica Online hi5
This is truly madness! A corporation calling the cops and doing their will to a virtual setting they could not manage themselves? This is down right evil.
Agree, just IP ban the hackers and their accounts when you find. No need to call Cops.
Because IP bans are scary and a great disincentive in future instances of these assholes ruining people's fun right? Fuck no. You want these assholes to stop making life a little more worse then you need a harsh and swift punishment in place. They wanna play with fire then who's to argue if they get the life burned out of them.
that harsh and swift punishment comes at the cost of tax payers. i dont know about you, but if my taxes went towards policing trolls on call of duty or world of warcraft, i would be fucking pissed. time and resources can be measure in money that gets bled out of all of us. i would hate to see that squandered on menial shit like this.
If you keep banning them and their IP addresses when you detect their presence you will only frustrate them. Do it enough and they'll get the message and GTFO.
Agreed! $80,000 seriously from selling hacks, how in the fuc... I don't even want to know how they got away with such a ring for so long. They need some sing sing.
@anon 10:06: security researchers earn more than that for every 0day exploit they sold be it in legal market or black market.
Please don't have mercy upon Nexon as they have the most unreliable service ever. Most cheats are just on the surface of the application, so poorly protected.
I find this to be a bit extreme. this is gonna leave a criminal record on those guys for sure.
They made $80 Grand from those hacks. I'm surprised they weren't erased.
At most it should be a civil matter and not a criminal one.
Depends. Normally, what they did was merely a breach of contract, and they could be held liable by a civil court. But in such a case, you normally wouldn't involve the cops.
This smells like they're trying to get them charged with one of those fancy anti-cyber terrorism (i.e. hacking) laws... Scary shit.
another good example of how the japanese genepool is so low on their tiny island, that inbred retardation is commonplace
ＯＫ， ＮＥＸＯＮ ＩＳ ＫＯＲＥＡＮ ＰＬＡＳＴＩＣ ＣＯＭＰＡＮＹ
Shouldn't you be fapping to some loli Mr Nippon desu ne?
STFU weeaboo.