14 DAY TRIAL // There are a lot of games that end up on the market well before their official release dates and there's nothing the publishers and developers can do at this point but accept the fact and deal with the losses. Well, Activision will have none of that and has decided to take a hands-on approach on the smuggling business. When an ad for several Modern Warfare 2 Xbox 360 bundles surfaced on Craigslist, the company decided to contact a private investigation firm to deal with the matter.
IPCybercrime.com, the Dallas-based firm, responded to the ad and requested to purchase said bundles, but also spotted another ad. The seller claimed to be a stock boy for a major game retailer and the two ads were put together by the company when the two suppliers of pirated Modern Warfare 2 copies were found to be related via a social network. The private eyes relayed the information to Activison that confronted the two “dealers,” whom, faced with reality, decided to give the games back to the retailer's loss-prevention staff.
What was a narrow escape for these two was a bit of a more dramatic scenario for Christian Del Amo. The investigators found one of his posts on an Xbox piracy forum, in which he asked people to donate him the funds to purchase one of those “early” MW2 bundles. What would seem like simple naivety quickly turned into insidious intentions, as he claimed that he would need the copy in order to crack it and redistribute it online.
IPCybercrime tracked his e-mail address to a Facebook account, from where it obtained his cellphone number and found out what the 18-year-old's name was. The police department was contacted and it put together a sting to apprehend the young man. The game was delivered by an intermediate that eventually led it back to Del Amo. He was arrested and is currently held in the Miami Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center. This wasn't his first incident regarding piracy, as he was known to have sold modded, 250GB Xbox 360 hard drives pre-loaded with some 125 hacked games. Even with its incisive actions, Activision wasn't able to keep Modern Warfare 2 from reaching the net, and, apparently, the Xbox 360 version is already available on several torrent sites.