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!”
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So when do they go arrest the politicians for cheating and lying?
never gonna happen they are above the law until enough people have found their wrongdoings and still they get off with a slap of the hand punishment
Once they become dumb enough to play anything made by Nexon
nexon doesnt really make stuff, they just provide the servers and localization for various, usually pay to win, mmos.
ＦＵＣＫ ＯＦＦ、 ＮＥＸＯＮ．
ＮＥＸＯＮ ＩＳ ＢＩＴＣＹ ＫＯＲＥＡＮ ＣＯＭＰＡＮＹ．
Shut The Fuck Up already, you whinny little Jap.
ＮＯ、ＹＯＵ ＦＵＣＫ ＯＦＦ。
We traced your ip, cops will be at your home shoerty.
Have a nice day.
-Nexon
you dun goofed!
- backtracing cybercops
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.
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.
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.
@anon 10:06: security researchers earn more than that for every 0day exploit they sold be it in legal market or black market.
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.
Well we all know nexon stocks are way below so they need someway to gain money, people have been hacking nexon on even there very first games why start catching them now and even charging them.
Simple, due to there lack of income this company will pretty much do anything to get money. People outside of Japan are probably laughing there ass off for being charge by cheating in a game.
I guess this is just a JP thing, but if this was something from NA the justice system will probably laugh at this and say get over it. Why do you think game company are easy target.
It didn't stop Anon from hacking a multi million dollar company like PS Network.
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.
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.
Banning sure but police involvement wtf?
Yes it's a total over reaction a sensible legal system would have told Nexon to fuck off and it's a civil matter.
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.
It's civil matter as for their value at most it's questionable.
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.
Negative votes nean nothing, try harder.
Thx for admitting your crime, this post has already been forward to Nexon's legal deparment.
Stealing the items which must be paid with $$ is a crime.
"Hacking"? Did they gain illegal access to non-wild data? Perhaps a server that had dev source code?
Or is the legal system throwing a word around so badly they might as well be arresting them for "magic"?
I find this to be a bit extreme. this is gonna leave a criminal record on those guys for sure.
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.
They made $80 Grand from those hacks. I'm surprised they weren't erased.
There is cheating, there is hacking... and then there is interfering with a gambling rig.
You don't do the later.
Another reason why you dont touch anything made by Nexon.
“We dealt with this strictly before, and we’ll grapple with illicit activity as aggressively as possible from now on as well.”
HAHAHAHAHAHA What a load of fucking shit xD!
I played Maple Story Global since beta, for the past.. around 10 years. I can't speak for other versions, but GMS has had massive client hacks, server hacks, and some other obscenely serious problems that resulted in them removing the MTS because it stored player logins. Yeah that happened. Combine that with people who had the same password for Basilmarket which conveniently had it's cache stolen before it was flushed.. to this day Bogdan absolutely refuses to accept any responsibility for his website's lack of security.. when his mods told him he needed it.
Also, most of the broken items hackers added into the game through dupes and other such bullshit still exist and plague GMS to this day, and Nexon still bans and punishes legit players for the hacker's wrongdoing..
But it's ok because Nexon's AGAINST hackers and will do everything they can to-OHLOOK SALE IN THE CASH SHOP EVERYHING IS 0.1% OFF! GAMBLE WITH GACHAPON FOR NOTHING!
BUY NX TODAY!
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.
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.
better stick to western mmos for your more casual needs, some do enjoy not gaining a level every monster you kill.
d'aaaw, ak-chan is sniffling.
Go rape her and make her cry!
This is just wrong...
Arrests for cheating in a game, arrests for being in the immediate vicinity of a high school girl, asking directions, looking "otaku-like".
Bullying to the point of suicide. "Call it an accident, the teachers are the real victims here."
I wake up in the morning and think about hanging my self, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL WORLD.
Yeah the world IS beautiful. It's dumbass-selfish-immoral douchebags that make it seem ulgy. Hangout with better people, and don't take negative bullshit to heart... and you'll be fine.
Cheating is one thing. Making money from the cheating is a completely different situation. It is easy for a company to prove "damages" to a court of law where the cheaters are financially profiting from their actions. Dumb ass kids stepping too far over the line is all this is. Your vanilla, everyday cheater wont see nearly this level of attention or action.
This is almost as bad as 4chan...??
Motoko has nothing better to do now does she?
While I hate Nexon, I hated the hackers that ruins some of my precious days in MapleStory far more.
So, this pleases me.