Italy’s financial police say they have successfully busted a ring that specialized in importing bootleg vintage video game consoles from China. According to the Italian authorities, the thousands of counterfeit consoles also contained millions of popular video games from the ’80s and ’90s.
“Around 12,000 consoles on which more than 47 million pirated video games were illegally stored were seized, for an estimated value of more than 47.5 million euros ($52.5 million),” head of the economic crime unit for Turin’s financial police, Alessandro Langella, told AFP (via TechXplore).
Popular games like Mario Bros. and Street Fighter were allegedly included with these consoles, which they say were imitations of Nintendo, Sega, and Atari machines. These were originally imported into Italy, but after they failed to meet European technical and safety standards, police began investigating the group bringing them into the country. Nine people were eventually arrested and they could face up to eight years in prison for the crime of trading counterfeited goods.
Retro gaming has seen a boom in the last couple of years, and with collecting at an all-time high, a very lucrative black market for fake video game cartridges and consoles has grown over the years. These knock-off carts are becoming increasingly more difficult to differentiate from the real deal, although there are online guides and groups dedicated to helping you avoid accidentally buying a fake game or system.
In one notable example of the counterfeit gaming market, two hackers participated in an attempt to build a counterfeit Xbox One using stolen data, but they were eventually caught and they pleaded guilty. Back in 2011, Atari accused distributor Tommo of importing bootleg versions of its Flashback 2 plug-and-play console, and for a more recent digital-only example, fake Helldivers 2 game pages appeared on Steam shortly after the game launched to commercial success.
Content Disclaimer and Copyright Notice
Content Disclaimer
The content provided on this website is sourced from various RSS feeds and other publicly available sources. We strive to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information, and we always provide source links to the original content. However, we are not responsible for the content’s accuracy or any changes made to the original sources after the information is aggregated on our site.
Fair Use and Copyright Notice
This website may contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We believe this constitutes a “fair use” of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
