ESEA pledged to donate all the generated Bitcoins to the American Cancer Society

May 2, 2013 12:41 GMT  ·  By

In a statement published a few hours ago, the E-Sports Entertainment Association (ESEA) has admitted that its software client hijacked the computers of customers and used their GPUs to generate Bitcoins.

The company performed some internal tests with a software client that used the GPUs logged into it to mine Bitcoin. The tests were run only on two administrator accounts.

On April 14, the company decided that “it wasn’t worth the potential drama,” so they pulled the plug on the project.

However, one of the employees involved in the project continued to use the client for his own personal gain, mining the equivalent of $3,713 (€2,819) over a two-week period. The issue came to light after several users complained about high resource consumption, and getting warnings from antiviruses.

“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,” ESEA stated.

“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.”

To set things straight, the client has been updated and all mining functionality has been removed.

In addition, all the money mined by users’ computers will be donated by the company to the American Cancer Society. The Season 14 League prize pot will also be increased by $3,713 (€2,819).

“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,” ESEA concluded its statement.