'Operation Tangled Web' Ends $2.5 Million Piracy Op
Last August, Homeland Security sealed the deal on "Operation Tangled Web," a broad investigation into the distribution of mod chips from China - chips that allow pirated games to be played. The feds made a series of raids and have been quiet ever since, but GamePolitics has dug up a pair of reports that tell more of the story, including naming the "kingpin" of the story, mod chip importer Manuel S. Diaz-Marta of Dallas, TX.
According to the documents obtained by GamePolitics, the investigation into Diaz-Marta began in November, 2006 when ICE Agent William Engel of the agency's Cleveland Field Office made undercover purchases of PlayStation 2 mod chips from www.modchipstore.com. An ICE check of domain registration records showed that the URL was registered to a Dallas company, NonStop Technologies. Feds then traced a money order used to make their undercover purchase and found that it had been deposited into a Wells Fargo Bank account registered to NonStop Technologies and Diaz-Marta. ICE alleges that Diaz-Marta listed his gross annual sales as $1,800,000 on Wells Fargo account application forms. When investigators seized the Wells Fargo account on August 1, 2007 it contained $109,100.55.
ICE also alleges that, between August, 2006 and February, 2007, the Wells Fargo account was used to make forty wire transfers totalling more than $500,000 to Supreme Factory, a Chinese company which federal investigators say is known to them as a distributor of mod chips. During the same time period, more than $1.2 million was deposited into the Wells Fargo account, presumably from mod chip sales within the United States. At that rate, federal investigators determined that modchipstore.com would have been generating roughly $2.5 million per year in sales.
$2.5 million a year in sales? That's a big number, to my eyes, for western piracy. It's a solid reminder that software pirates and their cohorts don't exist only in some abstracted Asian underworld. Buy stuff.
Feds' Mod Chip Raid Ended a $2.5 Million Piracy Operation [GamePolitics]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany on 24 November 2008
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: homeland security, mod chips, operation tangled web, piracy
I know this comes up on every one of these posts but: mod chips are not just used for piracy. Pretty much everyone I know who uses mod chips use them to play imports. And of the gamers I know, the ones with mod chips (or flash cards or use homebrew software) generally spend way more money on games in general than the ones who don't.
Sure, I'm sure there are a lot of jerks out there who just don't want to pay for anything, but the consistent attitude from this blog that everyone who mods their system is trying to avoid paying is really off the mark. There's a lot of demand for niche product out there that game companies have been unwilling to provide.
hmmm... i never knew selling mod chips for a video game was illegal