Skip to content

Technology and money in plain English · Since 2012

Business
News

Cheating in ‘Overwatch’ and ‘Fortnite’ is taken very seriously by Epic and Blizzard

Cheating in ‘Overwatch’ and ‘Fortnite’ is taken very seriously by Epic and Blizzard

We may earn a commission when you buy through links on this page. It doesn't change what we recommend.

Blizzard and Epic will not tolerate any cheating in Overwatch and Fortnite. Per Kotaku, we learned that a pair of Overwatch hackers were charged in South Korea after a year-long investigation by the authorities. Working together with Blizzard, the Seoul National Police Agency Cyber Security Department arrested more than a dozen hackers in total.

The first of the pair of offenders is on probation for two years. Should he violate the probation terms, he will be put in jail. The other of the pair has been fined ₩10,000,000 ($9,286.43). Starting last June, it became illegal to create and distribute game hacks in South Korea. Offenders could see a maximum fine of about $50,000 or five years in prison.

It’s not just South Korea either. Earlier this week, we learned that Chinese authorities arrested around 15 hackers, and fined them over $4.5 million for their illegally activities.

These actions seem justified, frankly. Developers are spending millions of dollars and thousands of hours into the games they’re creating. They don’t want the games to be ruined and all the fun taken out thanks to a few bad apples that create hacks and workarounds that give an unfair advantage.

See something that needs fixing? Report an error

Get The Jolt Journal in your inbox

The day’s top stories in tech, finance and AI, picked by our editors. Free.

Choose your newsletters

Up next

Keep reading

Add The Jolt Journal as a preferred source on Google

Add The Jolt Journal to your Home Screen to get alerts

Most Popular

More in Business

See all

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Breaking-news alerts

We’ll send a notification to this device when a big story breaks. Choose what you want, then allow notifications when your browser asks. You can change this or turn alerts off any time.

Send me