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General11 years agoGosu "GosuGamers" Gamers

ESEA caught using client to mine bitcoins



ESEA has used their own client for over two weeks to let users mine bitcoins. $3,600 were earned from over 29 bitcoins. Says was just a test, earnings will go into league prize money.

The esports organisation ESEA, most prominently known for running their Counter-Strike league, has been caught using their own client to let users mine bitcoins. As the CEO of ESEA, Eric 'lpkane' Thunberg confirmed in a forum post on his own site, The code has been running for over two weeks, using idling users' GPUs to mine the bitcoins.

According to Eric Thunberg, initially this was just a test about the idea of using connected systems via a client to mine bitcoins collaboratively. However, the ESEA users running their client were never asked if they allow the organisation to run such a mining code, as this was not part of the terms of service.

The bitcoin mining code, which according to lpkane now run for two weeks has mined over 29 bitcoins, which were now sold and led to earnings for ESEA of $3,600 dollars. The money will accordingly go into the ESEA season 14 prize money, while all premium members will be refunded with one ESEA premium month for free. According to ESEA, the relevant mining code has been removed from the client in a recent patch.

Even if the code has now been removed, ESEA is damaged from this cause in reputation and premium subscriber numbers. Calls for CEO lpkane to resign have already been made, as he apparently was unable to control which sort of code is running on his own clients.

Excerpt from Eric 'lpkane' Thunberg's second statement on ESEA:

"1. this has been running since april 14th, and definitely explains the virus warning due to the miner being a separate process

[...]

3. over the 2+ weeks it was apparently running, a total of 29.27627734 btc was mined, way more than 1.9!

4. daily sweeps were set up which converted btc to usd, and transactions totaled $3,602.21 (just sold the remaining btc to get a total)

so first the bad news, this is way more shady than i originally thought, and as the person who is ultimately responsible for everything it's 100% my fault

now the good news, as of the client update released in the last hour, all the btc stuff is out which should solve the gpu and av warnings, [...]"

Statement by ESEA-owner Craig Levine:

"The first I learned about any of this was last night (on any scale). I had no idea any of this was going on. Needless to say I am completely embarrassed, disgusted, and ashamed.

For the past ten years, I've tried to do nothing more than to act honestly and be an upstanding leader in the gaming community and with some bad decisions by some trusted people it has been thrown out the window.

I'm wrapping my mind around this whole thing and we'll release a formal response, but for the time being just know that this wasn't some ESEA / company wide scam.

I'm committed to doing whatever possible to rebuild the trust we lost through this whole fiasco."

Sources: reddit user renalucario, cadred, ESEA, cadred

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