July 17 (Portaltic/EP) –
Former Bungie general counsel and lawyer Former General Counsel of The Pokémon Company, Don McGowanhas revealed that, in one of his interventions to stop video game leaks when he was working on Pokémon, he ended up Calling the mother of a 14-year-old boy to inform you of the minor’s activities on the Internet and to prevent him from continuing to share hidden information about the Pokémon Trading Card Game TCG.
The leaker in question was a 14-year-old boy currently known on X (formerly Twitter) as Matthew Verive who, in 2011, discovered how to extract images from the Pokémon TCG card game for PC and began publishing such information on the Internet.
This is what McGowan recounted in an interview with Bloomberg video game journalist Jason Schreier on his Game On Newsletterwhere they have discussed issues related to the Tracking video game leaks, The discovery of the leakers and the differences between content leaks and leaks of misconductamong other.
In this regard, asked by one of the “craziest” stories about a leaker that he has had to deal with during his career, McGowan has referred to this story, which he has described as a anecdote with which he became “a legend” inside the company.
As McGowan explained, the Child discovered a security flaw in the Pokémon TCG Online trading card gamewith which he found a way to extract game images and found a developer icon. At that point, Verive believed it had found a new Pokémon and leaked the information on the Internet. However, included your email in the leak and therefore investigators of these incidents at Pokémon were able to locate him.
According to McGowan, because of how he created the Pokémon accounts at the time, they were able to obtain the information from the minor’s personal account, which included the Parents’ data, also a telephone numberWith him, the lawyer McGowan decided to end the problem by calling directly to the minor’s parents and explaining the situation to them.
“I called his mother and told her: ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you about some things Andrew (Matthew) is doing on his computer.’. She said to me: ‘So, you’re saying that he hacked your game?’ and in the background I heard ‘‘I didn’t hack anything!’“, McGowan said.
After that, the lawyer said that he began to describe the situation in a more technical way and the minor’s mother asked him if it was a problem. Then, McGowan explained to her that ‘hacking software was a federal crime, but he “didn’t want to bring that into the conversation.”
“Why don’t we turn this into a conversation about the good and bad things your child can do with a computer?” the lawyer said. He also said: While the phone call was taking place, the minor was publishing everything that was happening on X. Finally, after making the call, Verive deleted all content and stopped posting leaks.
For his part, the leaker Matthew Verive ha corroborated the story by recovering some of the publications that shared on X at the time of the call, in which he posted phrases such as “why did TPCi (The Pockémon Company International) just call my house?” or “I know exactly why TPCi is angry and I know it was a bad decision.”
I know exactly what TPCi is mad about, and I know it was a bad decision.
— Matthew Verive (@immewnity) April 7, 2011
Now, thirteen years later, Verive has apologized for causing problems when he was 14 years old. He also said in another post that doubt about the legality of this case Since, he said, reverse engineering is generally considered legal in the United States, provided the asset was obtained legitimately and, where applicable, “The data was downloaded to the client’s computer as part of normal gameplay.”
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