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All three are members Team Xecuter, a group that the government said develops and sells “jailbreak” devices that allow people to play pirated copies of games on their consoles.
A federal indictment accuses Max “MAXiMiLiEN” Louarn, a 48-year-old French national, Gary “GaryOPA” Bowser, 51, of Canada, and Yuanning Chen, 35, of Shenzhen, China of creating and distributing the devices, which authorities said became more popular as the COVID-19 pandemic limited the movement of people worldwide.
Team Xecuter targeted Nintendo’s Switch, 3DS and Entertainment System Classic Edition, the Sony PlayStation Classic and Xbox with the devices – several of which already came preloaded with pirated games, the Justice Department said in an indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
An ongoing investigation by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations produced the indictment, which was unsealed late last week following an announcement that hack seller Uberchips settled a lawsuit with Nintendo, paying $2 million in damages, for stocking Team Xecuter devices.
Unlike many hackers, who do it for fun, Team Xecuter looked to profit – hurting large companies and “hijacking” intellectual property, authorities said.
The ringleaders were so brazen that they made customers buy a “license” to unlock the full features of its custom firmware, the SX OS, a federal grand jury alleged.
“Imagine if something you invented was stolen from you and then marketed and sold to customers around the world,” Special Agent in Charge Raymond Duda of the FBI’s Seattle Field Office said. “That is exactly what Team Xecuter was doing.
“These arrests should send a message to would-be pirates that the FBI does not consider these crimes to be a game.”
Team Xecuter is comprised of more than a dozen members around the world – among them, developers, website designers, supplies and resellers – who “continuously sought to evade enforcement efforts by victim companies, financial institutions, and law enforcement,” according to the indictment.
The company “attempted to protect its overall business by using a wide variety of brands, websites, and distribution channels,” it says.
Team Xecuter “used a variety of product names for its devices,” the indictment alleges, “such as the Gateway 3DS, the Stargate, the TrueBlue Mini, the Classic2Magic, and the SX line of devices that included the SX OS, the SX Pro, the SX Lite, and the SX Core.”
The company “at times cloaked its illegal activity with a purported desire to support gaming enthusiasts who wanted to design their own videogames for noncommercial use,” the Justice Department said. “However, the overwhelming demand and use for the enterprise’s devices was to play pirated videogames.”
Boswer was deported from the Dominican Republic, while Louarn was to be extradited to the United States to face nearly a dozen charges against the trio, including wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, the Justice Department said. Chen, meanwhile, remained at large, the department said.
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