E-Sports Entertainment Involved In Bitcoin Mining Scandal
The E-Sports Entertainment Association is currently in hot water right now after several of its subscriber's discovered a Bitcoin miner in the ESEA's anti-cheat client. For a period of 2 weeks, gamers noticed that their computers were generating unusually high GPU loads and frequent BSOD errors. Some gamers stated that their GPUs were damaged due to them reaching temperatures above 90 degrees Celsius.
Eric Thunberg, co-owner of ESEA, stated that the Bitcoin miner was meant to be part of an April Fools joke, however, they weren't able to finish it in time. They then decided to put some of the test code into the clients belonging to a few ESEA administrators. They wanted to see if the bitcoin miner would offer any benefits to the ESEA community. After 2 days of testing, they decided to cancel the project altogether.
Unfortunately, according to an official statement released by Craig Levine, the other co-owner of ESEA, an employee involved in the test decided to use the test codes for his own personal gain. The employee, not Thunberg, enabled the Bitcoin miner which operated on an idle user's computer. Initially, it was believed that the miner only generated $280 worth of Bitcoins, but after further investgation, it was discovered that $3713.55 worth of Bitcoins were mined.
The ESEA is currently investigating the situation to find out who was the employee involved. Levine assures everyone that the employee will be disciplined and that nothing like this would happen again. It has also updated its client to remove all code relating to the Bitcoin Miner. As an apology, The ESEA is giving a free month of ESEA Premium to all those who subscribed for Premium in the month of April. The ESEA also asks that anyone who suffered hardware damage because of this situation to open a support ticket so that ESEA can rectify the problem.
To further attempt to make up for this transgression, ESEA is donating all of the money that was mined by its clients to the American Cancer Society. It is also matching that donation with a donation of its own, giving a total of $7427.10 to the charity. And to make things up to the ESEA community, the ESEA will also be donating an additional $3713.55 to the Season 14 League prize pot.
[via ESEA]