Update: ESEA co-founder Craig "Torbull" Levine has responded with a more official statement , posted to the ESEA news page.He admits they were testing Bitcoin integration, to "determine whether it was a feature that we might want to add in the future."Ultimately, Torbull says, they decided against it.He goes to claim that "an employee who was involved in the test has been using the test code for his own personal gain since April 13, 2013.""Theowners and management at ESEA all apologize to each of you that were impacted by the recent events and intend to make things right," Torbull continues."ESEA has issued a free month of ESEA Premium to all of our community members who were enrolled in Premium for the month of April.We also ask anyone who has experienced any physical damage to their computers to open an ESEA support ticket."Inan effort to maintain complete transparency, we have released all of the Bitcoin wallet addresses as well as data dumps of the wallets themselves.The value of the mined Bitcoins was $3,713.55 and ESEA will be donating 100% of the $3,713.55 to the American Cancer Society.

ESEA will also match 100% of this amount for a total of $7,427.10 donated.ESEA is also increasing the Season 14 League prize pot by $3,713.55."Original Story: Multiplayer eSports network ESEA was found to have malware in its anti-cheat client, which used users' graphics cards to mine for Bitcoins.Information about the exploit was posted to the ESEA's forums by user "ENJOY ESEA SHEEP", who found he had been unwittingly farming Bitcoins for someone in the community after noticing excessively high idle GPU usage.Mining is the legitimate, and deliberately system-intensive process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger - generating Bitcoins for the miner in the process.The ESEA client had been pooling the GPUs of users in order to generate more money for wallets held by ESEA staff.ESEA co-founder Eric 'lpkane' Thunberg responded to the accusation, initially claiming it was a mistakenly released April Fool's joke.His first statement is kind of amazing: "Lol that got aggressive quickly.

"Back towards the end of march, as BTC was skyrocketing, Jaguar and I were talking about how cool it would be if we could use massive amounts of GPUs logged into the client to mine."Wewent back and forth about it, considered doing something for April fools, didn't get it done in time, and eventually elected to put some test code in the client and try it on a few admin accounts, ours included."Weran the test for a few days on our accounts, decided it wasn't worth the potential drama, and pulled the plug, or so we thought."Fastforward to 48 hours ago, a fuck up in the client server results in a restart which results in a setting getting changed which enables it for all idle users, and here we are."Thunbergclaimed the combined efforts of ESEA users' unaware mining netted them roughly 2BTC, or $280, which he promised would be put towards the Season 14 prize pot.He returned with a second statement a few hours later, after users pointed out that anti-viruses had been flagging the client for longer than the claimed 48 hours.

He admits the mining had been part of the client since 14th April, and that the overall money mined totaled $3,602.21, before going to say: "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.bitcoin fad"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."Thunbergbitcoin ensayoonce again promised to use the now substantially higher total as part of the Season 14 prize pot, and that - as recompense for the additional strain that's been placed on user's GPUs - would gift a free one month Premium code for Premium account holders.bitcoin kurssi ennusteHe finished by saying, "once again, our bad, thanks for keeping us honest."Thanks,

Cadred and PCGamesN .The class-action suit is seeking damages and demanding a trial by jury for the ESEA.Earlier this month, a major scandal tarnished the ESEA's otherwise good reputation when it was revealed that admins had installed Bitcoin mining malware unknowingly onto player's computers.I won't bore you with the details of Bitcoin mining (which is quite interesting, actually), but just know that they essentially made almost $4,000 by demanding a large enough amount of system resources from affected computers, that it was causing player's graphics cards to die.Some of those players apparently didn't appreciate having their cards melted and their trust violated, and have in turn served the ESEA with a class action suit, seeking damages and demanding a trial by jury.The lawsuit has been drawn up by three claimants, Kevin Gallette, Jackson Smith and Roy Han, "on behalf of all others similarly situated" in California.The trio are citing laws including the Californian Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act, Unfair Competition, Fraud, Conversion and Product Liability.

When the accusations first flew, ESEA Co-founder Eric Thunberg initially pleaded ignorance, then tried to blame the whole thing on an "April Fools" joke gone wrong before eventually singling out "an employee acting on his own and without authorization."To his credit, Thunberg has pledged to add $3,713.55 (the total equivalent value of the Bitcoins mined during the whole fiasco) to the Season 14 prize pool, as well as donate double that amount to the American Cancer Society."ESEA is also in the process of taking all necessary steps internally to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again," he added, in an official response to the scandal.Source: PC Games N Prey 25 How Well Do You Know Samurai Jack?US regulators have smacked games biz ESEA with a $1m fine for surreptitiously installing a Bitcoin miner in its software.The settlement was announced on Tuesday and means ESEA gaming will pay the state of New Jersey $325,000 of its $1m fine upfront, and the rest will be scrubbed if the company has a clean record for the next ten years.

The company had 'fessed up in May to an employee using "test code for his own personal gain" to install a GPU-based Bitcoin miner on ESEA game software deployed across 14,000 PCs.That employee was fired, and the company poured the $3,700 worth of Bitcoins into a prize pot for its gaming clientele, and donated $7,427.10 to the American Cancer Society."At the very least your melted GPUs contributed to a good cause," wrote chief Eric Thunberg in the forum at the time.Though this was an effective mea culpa, the state regulators have decided to make an example out of the company, and so have fined it almost a hundred times the value of its ill-gotten funny money."This case should serve as a message that we are committed to protecting New Jersey consumers, and that we will hold accountable anyone who seeks to exploit them through misleading claims, deceptive practices or the invasion of their computer privacy," said acting attorney general John Hoffman in a press release.Unfortunately for ESEA, much of the regulator's announcement seems to misinterpret the way the ESEA client software worked, and levels allegations of privacy compromise at it as well, which ESEA disputes.