Suspected Illegal "Largest" Ukraine Crypto Mining Farm was actually a FIFA bot farm on PS4s

[kirbyrj]

I'm actually surprised this is still a thing. In FIFA you can buy currency to build your team or you can grind the in game currency called coins.You always get a few coins when playing games, even if you quit the game early. You can automate this and I'm assuming this was the grand scheme

I'm surprised because EA has put a lot of effort into stopping coin and account selling.

In the beginning you could trade a player with another person. That was being exploited so they removed the feature

You could also sell a player for any coin amount. That allowed people to sell coins to other players for real money. EA put in price limits for each player. You can't sell a 4th division English nobody for millions anymore so you'd have to transfer your coins using either some valuable players or many, many common players.

People started automating the FIFA webapp with code. There's an auction house in FIFA that's available through the webapp where you can buy and sell players instead of having to do so on your console. EA put in captchas, rate limiting and some obfuscation to basically put an end to all poorly written webapp bots

Then people started hacking consoles to be able to reverse engineer the auction house code (and plenty other stuff) They knew that the auction house on console didn't use the same servers as the webapp but couldn't figure out which or how to authenticate. The "console login" became the fut hackers holy grail, I don't think it was ever found.

In the meantime, EA put out a companion app for android and iOS with... Auction house access. That was reversed and folks noticed that these servers didn't have the same anti automation mechanisms in place. Insta buying high priced items wrongly listed at lower prices became a thing again

It was actually a very interesting back and forth war that went on during the first 5-6 years FIFA ultimate team. Coins on the grey market were going for quite a bit, accounts stacked with coins and the best players were going for even more. Some popular YouTubers were being exposed as cheaters because they'd be banned on live streams. People were starting websites that offered full databases with all players, each card version, average prices of players per platform, rarity, mostly information you could only obtain by scraping the webapp. Some EA shut down, but some exist until today, without the pricing info of course. Fun times

Quite frankly, this is the logical next step after introducing microtransactions in games. We are all worse off for it.

 

[Ebernanut]

God forbid you read the fucking article. They were PS4 slims, and they had game discs in them.

If you had read the article you would have seen that they said some had disks, not game disks.

FTA:

some noticed that many of the PS4 Slims had discs sitting in their disc slots. However, it was difficult to tell what the discs were actually for.

And again you're ignoring that the original statement from authorities called it a crypto farm and that they seized a large number of GPUs and CPUs. Your whole premise of "This isn't crypto so suck it haters"* for the thread is wrong.

*Paraphrased