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E-Sports Entertainment agrees on settlement with the state of New Jersey over alleged "hijacked" computers

E-Sports Entertainment agreed to a one million dollar settlement with the state of New Jersey over bitcoin mining scandal.

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This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

E-Sports Entertainment, owners and administrators of the popular ESEA League client, have agreed to a one million dollar settlement with the state of New Jersey regarding a bitcoin, an anonymous digital currency, mining scandal earlier this year.

On May 1st an ESEA forums user named ScRaPPyCoCo posted a thread called, "WARNING YOU ARE BEING MINED." In the thread the user alleged that he "dumped eseaclient.exe" and found compelling evidence that the ESEA client was using his graphics card to mine bitcoins.

Later in the day E-Sports Entertainment co-owner Eric 'lpkane' Thunberg would write three very damning sentences in another forum post:

"back towards the end of march, as btc was skyrocketing, jaguar and i were talking about how cool it would be if we could use massive amounts of gpus logged into the client to mine"

"we went back and forth about it, considered doing something for april fools, didn't get it done in time, and eventually elected to put some test code in the client and try it on a few admin accounts, ours included"

"anyway, our bad, we just released a client update with the btc stuff removed, and your $280 is going into the s14 prize pot -- if you're still feeling sad, feel free to pm me and i'll attempt to buy back your love"

After further digging internally, Thunberg would update ESEA League users with another post, noting that the miner had been operational for two weeks and had actually generated $3,602.21 instead of the initially reported $280. The New Jersey complaint alleges that the ESEA client took control of over 14,000 computers.

Acting Attorney General of New Jersey John J. Hoffman said, “This is an important settlement for New Jersey consumers. These defendants illegally hijacked thousands of people’s personal computers without their knowledge or consent, and in doing so gained the ability to monitor their activities, mine for virtual currency that had real dollar value, and otherwise invade and damage their computers."

E-Sports Entertainment must pay New Jersey $325,000 of its $1 million settlement. The remainder is suspended and will be vacated within 10 years provided the company adheres to all settlement terms and avoids future violations. Settlement terms include changes is creation of a new consumer information page that will include information on "how consumers can restrict, limit, opt-out of, or otherwise control the data or consumer information," that the ESEA client collects.

onGamers reached out to E-Sports Entertainment for a quote, but at the time of publication they had not responded.

Photo Credit: http://play.esea.net/

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