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IPFS News Link • Bitcoin

Gaming Company Fined $1M for Turning Customers Into Secret Bitcoin Army

• http://www.wired.com,, By Robert McMillan
 E-Sports Entertainment Association (ESEA) — which lets serious CounterStrike players face each other down in anti-cheat modes — infected about 14,000 of its customers with the code, which ended up mining about 30 bitcoins over two weeks last spring.

The company blamed a rogue employee, who has since been terminated. It’s still facing a class action over the matter in California. “What transpired the past two weeks is a case of an employee acting on his own and without authorization to access our community through our company’s resources,” ESEA co-founder Craig Levine told WIRED back in May.

The settlement was announced today by the New Jersey Attorney General, which says that ESEA will pay $325,000 of the fine upfront, and will only be hit with the rest of the penalty if it’s caught misbehaving over the next decade.

In a press release, the Attorney General’s office called the software a “botnet” that could monitor customers even when they weren’t using the ESEA software.


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