PK Fire PK Fire
Come on shell, you got this. PK Fire PK Fire
Come on shell, you got this.
PK Fire Come on shell, you got this.
PK Fire
Take that Grill PK Fire
Take that Grill
There you go I got you
Video games are serious business,
or at least that’s what the internet tells me.
They are a billion - with a b - dollar
market, with ties to many other industries.
But usually messing around in your
favorite game doesn’t lead to legal action.
Which is not the case with today’s topic.
Stop right there criminal scum.
So settle in for a case that saw a group of gamers
dig too deep, one which started with fun and ended
with theft, industrial espionage, international
fugitives, fatalities, and the flagship series for
one of the biggest tech companies in the world...
With that out of the way…
Let’s get into it.
It was Mario.
Like any good case, our story starts with a crew.
And like any crew, the “Xbox Underground”
starts with the brains.
In this case, one David “Xenomega” Pokora.
Born in Mississauga, Canada, Pokora was playing
computer games before he could read or write.
According to WIRED, he had made his own web
browser by elementary school, and by 2002
he had entered the world of Xbox hacking.
And it was through this world that he’d meet kindred spirits.
Like Rowdy VanCleave - the fixer, of a certain sort.
Already a member of a Xbox hacker group,
VanCleave had heard that an electronics recycling
facility had Xbox DVD drives on sale for cheap.
He went looking for a deal, and found a
jackpot: Xbox 360 dev kit motherboards. He went looking for a deal, and found a
jackpot: Xbox 360 dev kit motherboards.
Thousands of them.
For those not in the know, a “dev kit” is a version
of a console specifically made for game developers.
They have additional permissions, including the ability
to create programs for the console, and to download
early builds of games for quality assurance purposes
through an industry network known as “Partner Net”.
Something that you don’t want the public to have.
But for Xbox hackers, this was the dream.
Taking these motherboards which were meant to be
securely destroyed, they played unreleased builds of
games, and tried making and running their own programs.
Pokora managed to impress VanCleave enough to score a
motherboard for himself… and a few others - allegedly
acting as a motherboard salesman for VanCleave.
Anthony Clark found Pokora through Halo modding
sites, and became fascinated by Pokora’s posts.
A skilled hacker himself, Clark could turn the
Xbox’s machine language into a proper programming
language and the two teens became fast friends.
They even found ways to make money from their hobby.
The two offered modded Call of Duty servers with
superpowers like flight or the ability to phase
through walls for up to $100 per half-hour.
For a little more, they offered longer
term cheats they called “Infections”.
The business was lucrative, to say the least.
Reportedly, the two made up to $8000 on busy days.
And Pokora’s action drew eyes to him.
Eyes from people like Dylan “SuperDaE” Wheeler, the wildcard.
An Australian teen, Wheeler was only 14 in 2010
when he got a hold of a list of Epic Game forum
usernames and passwords from a friend of his.
Looking through the list, Wheeler discovered
credentials belonging to an IT admin.
Wheeler knew he had found something big,
and he knew exactly who to bring it to.
Pokora was interested, but he didn’t want to just
log in to Epic’s network from his own IP address.
That’s when he turned to another of the growing group.
Sanad “Sonic” Nesheiwat had something the others
didn’t: A hacked modem that let him hide his location.
Nesheiwat downloaded an early
build of hit title Gears of War 3.
The group started playing the unfinished
build, and showing it to their friends.
One of these was Justin “MTW” May, a hacker who had
bought a dev kit motherboard from Pokora previously.
But, just days after showing May the build,
it was leaked to torrent site The Pirate Bay.
Which is when Epic called the FBI.
Needless to say, this freaked out the crew.
In the words of Nesheiwat:
“They were talking to each other and the FBI
agent was like oh, I don’t see any intrusions.
I just see some malware from South
Africa or something like that.
I’m like okay, so they’re not onto
us so let’s stop while we’re ahead.”
But not everyone played it safe.
While at the Boston PAX gaming convention, May saw
a chance to sneak into the booth of Atomic Games
and stole the code for the unreleased game Breach.
However, he was spotted by staff and arrested
after trying to escape into the crowd.
According to some witnesses, May had claimed to know
of bigger things to the authorities as he was arrested.
As time went on, the Xbox Underground added more
members, like Nathan “AnimeFre4k” Leroux who had
created a program to mint fake coins to buy virtual
items in the popular soccer game, EA’s FIFA 2012.
But compared to what was still to
come, this was all small scale.
Through May, Pokora had started selling stolen
prerelease copies of video games to a buyer known
only as “Xboxdevguy” for a few hundred dollars each.
Now the team had a chance to get their
hands on something more tangible.
While poking through internal Microsoft servers, the team
had managed to dig up the specs on Microsoft’s upcoming
project, “Durango” - better known these days as the Xbox One.
But instead of selling the information,
the team came up with a different plan.
They decided to build their own.
Finding matching parts the team had the components shipped
to Leroux’s house where the bootleg Xbox was assembled.
They managed to find an Xbox hacking group out of the
Seychelles who were willing to buy it for $5,000 USD.
The money went to Leroux, and May
volunteered to ship the Xbox out.
But it never made it to the Seychelles, and the team
got nervous - and more suspicious of May, believing
he may have turned coat after his arrest at PAX.
And they had good reason to be.
While snooping around game developers, the Xbox
Underground found something on Spec Ops series developer
Zombie Studios’ servers: a link to US Military servers.
Which is where they got an Apache helicopter
training simulator, and attracted the
attention of the US Army themselves.
With growing heat, the question of how to end things rose,
and for Wheeler, the answer seemed to be “in a blaze of
glory.” He posted an Ebay auction for a second bootleg Xbox
One that rose over to $20,000 before Ebay pulled the listing.
The publicity of this led to a falling
out between Wheeler and Pokora.
Wow.
This story about video games sure got dark.
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With so many eyes on them, it was only a
matter of time until the other boot dropped.
And it dropped hard.
Leroux was the first to go down, going
dark after being arrested by the FBI.
Granted bail, they tried to flee to Canada and wound up
in a standoff with the Canadian Border Guard, which led to
Leroux stabbing themself multiple times until they collapsed.
Surviving, Leroux was sentenced to 24 months in prison.
During this time Leroux came out as
transgender and changed names to Holly.
According to the DarkNet Diaries podcast they
lost their life in a Motel in Fresno, California.
It was believed by local authorities that they
took their own life, along with another woman.
Nesheiwat was the next to fall.
In December 2012 the FBI had traced
him to the team and raided his home.
He posted a copy of his warrant online - which
Wheeler picked up and used to doxx the
special agent and judge involved in the case.
Having drawn more attention, Wheeler was
arrested by Australian police in connection
to the team in an early morning raid.
Released on bail, Wheeler fled from Australia to
his mother’s home country, the Czech Republic,
resulting in his mother being arrested and sentenced
to 18 months in prison for aiding in his escape.
Pokora was arrested in 2014 while crossing the
border into the USA to pick up a bumper for his
project car, which May had held onto for him.
Both Pokora and Nesheiwat were
sentenced to 18 months in prison.
After Leroux’s arrest, Clark and another team member, Austin
“AAMonkey” Alcala, had started a business selling “fake”
FIFA coins which had blossomed into a million dollar venture.
Both were arrested for wire fraud.
Alcala cooperated and faced only
supervised release in a plea bargain.
Clark passed away from a lethal mixture of
alcohol and medication before his trial ended.
His family insists it was not intentional.
And May?
Well, after the case closed he was arrested on
separate charges of scamming companies like Cisco and
Microsoft out of millions of dollars worth of hardware.
What had started with simple curiosity had
turned into something bigger, something uglier.
It had gone from a group of friends playing
games to a mess of legal and moral offenses
that destroyed lives, and even ended some.
In the end, well, maybe Pokora’s words best sum it up:
“As much as I consciously made the decisions I
did, I never meant for it to get as bad as it
did… what it turned into, it’s regrettable.”
Hey folks, thanks for watching the episode, and thank you to
World of Tanks for sponsoring it, we had a good time with it.
And if you think you’d have fun with it too we’ve
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