14 DAY TRIAL // Don't get too excited and don't start searching inside your gaming console just yet - it's not like a dream come true or something similar, it's more like the biggest nightmare. Because this discovery comes hand in hand with the word "illegal". And when The Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) is involved, you really don't want to be around.
The story is quite simple, yet funny and outrageous: the ELSPA conducted a raid to investigate a man operating some illegal business. The guy was selling PSP SD memory cards and other illegal stuff, so a visit was a real necessity. Still, you can probably imagine the shock the investigators had when they found ?12,000 stuffed into a single Xbox 360 and three PlayStation 2 consoles.
The raid took place at a man's house (name undisclosed) in Tower Hamlets and all the goods confiscated by the Tower Hamlets Trading Standards investigators and officers from the Metropolitan Police were left out a few days, until the ELSPA IP Crime unit started its own investigation. Following the standard protocol, they started to remove the casing of the consoles, hoping to find inside the illegal chips the man was selling. But greater things were expecting them.
The Xbox contained a staggering ?5,925 where the hard drive should have been and the three PlayStation2s each volunteered ?2,835, ?2,025 and ?1,425 respectively, making a grand, wallet-bulging total of ?12,210 recovered.
Yes, all this sounds amazing. And if you think about the fact that this man was caught in possession of about 75 SD memory cards and he had many more sold, it makes you wonder just how much money did he cost Sony and Microsoft. Not that the sum would be a big hit for either company, anyway. But it's still illegal and these money represent quite a sum for many people. Still, I have one question: how come this guy replaced his hard disks with money and practically said "No!" to some really cool games? Strange things happen in this world, I tell you!