Hacking doesn’t always pay off.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested a twenty-five-year-old man with the accusation of hacking Electronic Arts’ servers to steal FIFA 18’s in-game currency. The publisher claims the amount of currency is worth 324 thousand (!) dollars.

The man in question is called Martin Marsich, a Serbian/Italian citizen. He got arrested at an airport. He’s charged with „intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorisation to obtain information for commercial advantage and private financial gain,” and „accessing a protected computer to defraud and obtain anything of value,” according to a press release issued by the Department of Justice.

How did Marsich even access EA’s servers? Justin Griggs, an FBI agent, said in an affidavit that he used an exploit in NBA Live 15 to access the backend, and with a secret access token, he could create a connection to FIFA 18. Then, he distributed copies of the game to seventeen thousand (!) EA accounts, as well as FIFA in-game currency packs to eight thousand. All of these were sold on the black market, possibly for a lot of money.

Marsich will appear in court next week. There was a similar case in 2016: then, FBI accused a group of mining coins from EA servers, then selling them on the black market. One of them, a Texan resident, Anthony Clark, was found dead in his home a few months later…

Source: Kotaku