Geposted von MooZE,
Eine unglaubliche Nachricht erreichte die Szene-Seiten am heutigen Mittag. Wie ein User herausgefunden haben soll, nutzte die ESEA ihre Nutzer seit dem 14.04.2013 aus, um Aufgaben zu lösen, die Bitcoins einbringen. Dies soll über den PUG-Clienten passiert sein - die Grafikkarte des Users wurde dabei verwendet. Bitcoins sind eine neue Art, im Internet Geld zu machen. Dabei wird auf die Grafikkarte des Users zugegriffen, sofern diese nicht aktiv ist. Mit Hilfe der Grafikkarte werden komplizierte Aufgaben gelöst, die dem Besitzer schließlich Bitcoins beziehungsweise Geld einbringen. Dabei wird der GPU mehr beansprucht, das zum einen ein schnelleren Verschleiß der Grafikkarte - andererseits höhere Stromkosten bedeutet. Dieses Verfahren hat die ESEA zwei Wochen lang laufen lassen, ohne die User darüber informiert zu haben. Innerhalb der letzten zwei Wochen wurden 3.602 US-Dollar eingenommen, die nun aber direkt in den Preis-Pool für die ESEA Season 14 wandern sollen. Auch die Verantwortlichen der ESEA haben sich mittlerweile zu diesem Thema geäußert und ein offizielles Statement abgegeben.

*UPDATE* 21:15 Uhr

Soeben hat ESEA Mitgründer Craig 'Torbull' Levine ein Statement zu der Bitcoin-Affäre abgegeben:



Throughout the history of gaming and e-sports, there have been scams and straight up theft by players, teams, event organizers, and even “sponsors.” Over the past ten years ESEA has prided itself on being an upstanding member of the gaming community by providing a high quality service, paying out prize money, and being upfront and transparent with you, the community. We worked hard to build your trust and often took the longer, slower, and more meticulous road than others. That approach has paid off as we had success with our premium service and league. Over the two weeks we failed our community.

ESEA’s goal is to provide our community with cutting edge technology and tools. Whenever possible, the management and owners at ESEA initiate private tests on potential new products and tools that might interest our community. With the whole fervor around Bitcoin, we did conduct some internal tests with the Client on only two of our own, consenting administrators’ accounts to see how the mining process worked and determine whether it was a feature that we might want to add in the future. We thought this might be an exciting new tool that we could provide to our community. Ultimately, we decided that it was not.

On April 13, 2013, after the initial tests, ESEA informed those involved in the test that we were killing the project and they should stop using the beta test. It came to our attention last night, however, that an employee who was involved in the test has been using the test code for his own personal gain since April 13, 2013. What transpired the past two weeks is a case of an employee acting on his own and without authorization to access our community through our company’s resources. We are extremely disappointed and concerned by the unauthorized actions of this unauthorized individual. As of this morning, ESEA has made sure that all Bitcoin mining has stopped. ESEA is also in the process of taking all necessary steps internally to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.

The owners and management at ESEA all apologize to each of you that were impacted by the recent events and intend to make things right. ESEA has issued a free month of ESEA Premium to all of our community members who were enrolled in Premium for the month of April. We also ask anyone who has experienced any physical damage to their computers to open an ESEA support ticket.

In an effort to maintain complete transparency, we have released all of the Bitcoin wallet addresses as well as data dumps of the wallets themselves. The value of the mined Bitcoins was $3,713.50 and ESEA will be donating 100% of the $3,713.50 to the American Cancer Society. ESEA will also match 100% of this amount for a total of $7,427.10 donated. ESEA is also increasing the Season 14 League prize pot by $3,713.50.

As a team, we work hard to create cool things and we’ve worked even harder to consistently do things the right way. While it’s incredibly disturbing and disappointing that this happened, we’re committed to improving ourselves and rebuilding trust with our community.




first make sure you read part 1 of this developing story:
http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=492134

now for the more interesting news:
1. this has been running since april 14th, and definitely explains the virus warning due to the miner being a separate process
2. there were a total of 3 wallets on 3 pools set up for the test with the following addresses:
- 50btc: 1NsEeuxWB4ZvjVrxZcsmeMktDJPG5m4NCn
- btc guild: 13X5R8tTGkvZnsvFd12AHqwpF2hp34QKUa
- slush pool: 1NLy5djpAeU7uVNQ8meLQ4CweFU1hNfkQP
3. over the 2+ weeks it was apparently running, a total of 29.27627734 btc was mined, way more than 1.9!
4. daily sweeps were set up which converted btc to usd, and transactions totaled $3,602.21 (just sold the remaining btc to get a total)

so first the bad news, this is way more shady than i originally thought, and as the person who is ultimately responsible for everything it's 100% my fault
now the good news, as of the client update released in the last hour, all the btc stuff is out which should solve the gpu and av warnings, and in a blatant attempt to buy back your love (and less likely your trust), i'm going to do the following:
1. 100% of the funds are going into the s14 prize pot, so at the very least your melted gpus contributed to a good cause
2. every user who was premium this month will get a free one month premium code which they can use whenever and for whomever they like, and you'll find the code under manage accounts -> premium codes

once again, our bad, thanks for keeping us honest


Statement Craig 'Torbull' Levine - Besitzer der ESEA:

The first I learned about any of this was last night (on any scale). I had no idea any of this was going on.

Needless to say I am completely embarrassed, disgusted, and ashamed.

For the past ten years, I've tried to do nothing more than to act honestly and be an upstanding leader in the gaming community and with some bad decisions by some trusted people it has been thrown out the window.

I'm wrapping my mind around this whole thing and we'll release a formal response, but for the time being just know that this wasn't some ESEA / company wide scam.

I'm committed to doing whatever possible to rebuild the trust we lost through this whole fiasco.

It's a failure on my part to have the proper oversight to have prevented this from happening and it will be addressed.

My primary concern at this point is community trust and how that was destroyed. We need to understand the situation, take the appropriate action with those responsible for it, ensure we have things in place to prevent this from happening, and address anyone who incurred physical damages.

How we rebuild the trust of the community in the immediate aftermath and long term future is going to be a different discussion that we need to have as I walk through this all.


Derzeit wird abgeraten die ESEA-Seite zu besuchen, da dort definitiv ein Malware-Trojaner-Mix vorhanden sein soll. Dieser gibt sich als Fake-Antivirus aus und kann sich sogar in die Windows-Registry einklinken. Weitere Infos findet ihr hier.

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