Pwn3d by the FBI

So what do you get when you buy stolen source code for a popular overseas game and run your own version of it? You get your domain hijacked by the FBI and you go to jail.

Great story by the good guys at the FBI here:

It must have seemed like the perfect scheme buy the stolen source code of a popular online game, rent some servers to run the game as your own, and then hang a shingle on the web inviting gamers to come play at a steep discount.

A California man who followed that path must have thought he d never get caught. He was even warned once by the game s rightful owner, a large South Korean company, to shut down. He didn t.

So the company, which has offices in Austin, called the FBI. The suspect was apparently lining his own pockets from donations and ads on his site while his pirated version of the game, Lineage II, was siphoning $750,000 a month in potential revenues from the company.

Last November, Agent Thompson led a raid on the California man s home, shut down the game, seized the l2extreme domain, and posted the FBI anti-piracy warning on the site. Meanwhile, the company posted a press release on its website announcing the raid. We ve taken this action because we strongly believe in defending the intellectual property rights that we ve worked so hard to create, the company said in the release.

On the message boards by fans of the site, a lot of them posted questions wondering what was going on, and mostly complaining about not being able to play for almost free anymore. A google cache page of the old site is here.