In the spring of 2013, thousands of competitive gamers were unknowingly running a Bitcoin miner on their computers. It was hidden inside the anti-cheat software they had installed to prove they weren't cheating.
ESEA ran leagues for competitive Counter-Strike players. To participate, you installed their client — kernel-level access to your machine, necessary to catch cheaters. That access requires trust. ESEA's players had given it.
Between April 13 and April 30, an ESEA employee secretly embedded Bitcoin mining code into the client. It ran silently for 17 days across thousands of machines. The miner pushed GPUs hard. Users noticed: temperatures spiking, fans screaming, graphics cards failing. Replacement cost: ~$300 each. Total mined: roughly $3,700 worth of Bitcoin.
ESEA fired the employee and called it a lone rogue actor. The community wasn't buying it. On July 3, three gamers filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court. In November 2013, New Jersey regulators added a $1 million fine.
This was one of the first documented cases of Bitcoin being secretly extracted through malware embedded in legitimate software. The mechanics — trusted process, elevated permissions, GPU compute quietly redirected, Bitcoin as frictionless payout — became the template for years of cryptojacking attacks that followed.
Source: https://kotaku.com/e-sports-league-hit-with-lawsuit-over-bitcoin-mining-sc-692954889
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