PS3 CoD:MW2 banner extortion message -NEED HELP

Hammyman

I was playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 on my PS3 last night and ended up in a hacked lobby.

On coming out of it, the message on the scrolling banner changed to say something along the lines of:

You have been owned. To remove this message send a payment of £x to paypaml address xxxxxx@xxxxx. Send as a gift.

If anyone else has had this message and if they still have it, could you PM me? If you've got a screenshot - even a photo taken with a digital camera - that would be great.

IF YOU GET THIS MESSAGE PLEASE CAN YOU TAKE A PHOTO OF IT AND PM ME??

Stupidly I got rid of the banner message before then deciding it needed to be reported to the Police.

I'm currently trying to get evidence for the Police. I've intentionally left the email address blank however I know what it is.

JasX

If the message is gone now whats the problem?

If the message is still there could you not take a photo yourself?

Does the PS3 not have a 'history' feature listing all recent lobbies connected to so you could go looking for it if you've already been hit for all the damage its going to do?

Hammyman

First problem is that I had to delete my saved game - that wiped out all of my progress in single player, hours worth.
Second problem is that I had to delete the patch and add-ons I'd purchased which meant I then had to download them again - 670MB at PSNs slow speed.
Thirdly, it irretrievably wiped all my achievements that I'd achieved over 16 days (as in 384hrs) gameplay.

But the biggest one by far is that it is demanding money. It is the first time in 17 years playing online I've seen someone demanding money. You get an idea of the seriousness of this when you work out that all the time this scrote is online, anyone who joins a game with him in suffers all the above and that when he joins a new lobby, he effectively has 17 more potential victims who may possibly pay him.

Apparently the scrote who did it is the scrote who wrote it and I've a dozen nice incriminating emails from said scrote stating he designed it and distributed it and youtube video of him actually writing it. He's given enough evidence and there's enough evidence online that if it ever ended up in court, he is indefensible and his council would advise him to plead guilty.

grimsalve

Hammyman wrote: »

Apparently the scrote who did it is the scrote who wrote it and I've a dozen nice incriminating emails from said scrote stating he designed it and distributed it and youtube video of him actually writing it. He's given enough evidence and there's enough evidence online that if it ever ended up in court, he is indefensible and his council would advise him to plead guilty.

Except there's nothing you've got to go on apart from a PSN id (which is easy to create with an email address from google, hotmail, yahoo, etc.), and an email address ... which is probably one of the above.

And even if you could prove beyond doubt that the PSN id and email address exclusively belonged to him, what could you legally threaten him with? I doubt very much the police would be interested.

Kingsd316

would it not be extorsion and bribery?

mr_fishbulb

Kingsd316 wrote: »

would it not be extorsion and bribery?

You have to be threatened with pain and suffering (according to Wikipedia) for it to be extortion. Don't think affecting someone's progress in a computer game would be seen as a serious enough threat.

Hammyman

Well local police (Humberside - near bottom of league tables) have no interest in investigating a third party claim - I'd have to be a victim. Pointing out that under the Computer Misuse Act I actually was a victim didn't seem to matter, it was only electronic so who cares?

Met Police eCrime unit don't care either.

What is the point in having an offence if nobody can be arsed to enforce it? Meanwhile all the time this guy is online and in lobbies, potentially over 60 people per hour suffer the way I did.

debitcardmayhem

mr_fishbulb wrote: »

You have to be threatened with pain and suffering (according to Wikipedia) for it to be extortion. Don't think affecting someone's progress in a computer game would be seen as a serious enough threat.

Of course wikileaks would say threatened with extradition. It is still an offence under the law in this country (England of course don't care about the devolved) and as such be treated thus. Perhaps it is a Swede Hammy get a Euro Warrant on him. Spoilers like that still get what they deserve, perhaps their PS3 should spontaneously combust.

grimsalve

Hammyman wrote: »

Well local police (Humberside - near bottom of league tables) have no interest in investigating a third party claim - I'd have to be a victim. Pointing out that under the Computer Misuse Act I actually was a victim didn't seem to matter, it was only electronic so who cares?

Met Police eCrime unit don't care either.

What is the point in having an offence if nobody can be arsed to enforce it? Meanwhile all the time this guy is online and in lobbies, potentially over 60 people per hour suffer the way I did.

I thought as much

I bet if you agreed to send him the money through Paypal but somehow forged the payment so he didn't get a penny then the police would come after you for fraud/deception though

Unfortunately it's a security problem that Sony took ages to sort out (PS3 jailbreaking) and then Activision didn't bother to do anything about (by then they were rubbing their hands with all the profit they were making out of Black Ops) - a lot of people got their MW2 stats and achievements reset and just decided to play something else - I went back to Resistance 2 :cool2:

Hammyman

Update: It wasn't Met eCrime that was contacted in the first instance but Met Police and the officer who got the initial enquiry didn't know the eCrime department existed and replied that there was no such department. I replied with a link to their website and the name of the Deputy Commissioner heading it at which point it appears it was passed on and said officer "educated".

Today I had a phone call from an officer in the eCrime unit. His job within the unit is specifically to deal with online gaming and judging from the conversation we had, he is very technically compentent not only regarding consoles but networking, hacking, etc. He said that this was the first of this type of "malware" or hack that he'd seen and initial investigations show there's a fair few who've had this and also he found the same video as I did of the guy writing it. Its going to get investigated.

grimsalve

Hammyman wrote: »

He said that this was the first of this type of "malware" or hack that he'd seen and initial investigations show there's a fair few who've had this and also he found the same video as I did of the guy writing it. Its going to get investigated.

Wow, that's really good news - please update the thread if anything comes out of this investigation, there's thousands of people who have been affected by this but so far nothing has ever been done about it.