Venture Beat has reported that eighteen year old Christian Del Amo was arrested by US police officers yesterday after allegedly attempting to sell pirated copies of Modern Warfare 2.
Towards the end of October Activision Blizzard hired IPCybercrime, an online investigation firm, to take a closer look at some suspicious posts on Craigslist which were advertising Modern Warfare 2 Xbox 360 bundles for sale a week and a half before official release.
Posts on piracy community forum Xbox360iso.com suggested that Del Amo had somehow procured an early copy of the game and had cracked the copy protection, making it possible to release the game on international Torrent sites days later.
According to Shack News “Investigators used social networking sites, user posts in online piracy forums, and several sting operations to identify those involved in the pirating operation, which ultimately lead to Del Amo’s arrest yesterday.”
Prior to this Del Amo ran a site which sold modified Xbox 360 hard drives featuring pirated software, through which customers could purchase a 250GB Western Digital hard drive containing 125 illegally pirated games for $150 (roughly R1100).
“We plug leaks every day,” said Rob Holmes, owner of IPCybercrime, “but this was one of the biggest ones of the year.”
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