While Google is busy wooing China to get back to the country at the summit in Wuzhen, Microsoft is battling a Chinese company siphoning away its money. According to Microsoft's complaint filing, a Chinese game site has been hacking into Xbox accounts since 2015, and selling the loot in open market, which means for almost 2 years Microsoft has been bleeding out and the company noticed it just now.
The game site in question is iGSKY, which parades as a gaming service firm that offers players a way to pay for in-game credits and collectibles but according to the complaint, these purchases were made using hacked accounts and their credit card details. Thus, the company was simply buying credits for their customers by siphoning off details from the original Xbox users. By taking ingenious and illegal method, Microsoft alleges, the company has scooped up around $2 million till date.
This illegal operation came into the surface, when Microsoft's in-house sleuths posted a customer and started purchasing on iGSKY, every transaction they initiated, they received a subsequent request asking to change email and password of old accounts.
Similarly, as soon as iGSKY provided Microsoft's undercover team with the details in a mail with the instruction to get rid of the points, the original customer of the Xbox account raised a complaint to the Microsoft customer support that he/she has been locked out of Xbox account and that unauthorized purchases have taken place.
Although, it's still not established how the perpetrators managed to get into the system but according to reports, there has not been any broader breach.
Since this gaming website, in question, is based in China, it would be a difficult task to completely shut down this illegal website, reported The Verge. However, the alleged company's PayPal accounts and domestic assets have been frozen temporarily by a restraining order.
