Online store owner indicted for selling cracked Switch consoles, profiting over TWD4.78 million

　A man, surnamed Lin (hereinafter “Lin”), in New Taipei City, had opened an online store on Shopee to provide to players the services of bypassing the anti-piracy protection of Nintendo Switch consoles and to sell cracked versions of Switch consoles and pirated game software, earning illicit gains over TWD4.78 million in less than a year beginning from the end of 2022 through September 24, 2023.  

　According to the prosecutorial and police investigation, Nintendo Switch consoles are equipped with anti-piracy function to detect and verify if the game cartridges being read are genuine ones, and pirated ones are unable to be executed.  Lin set up an online store to provide to players the technical services of cracking, disabling, or bypassing anti-piracy protection; players may either purchase from Lin modified consoles or send their own consoles to Lin for modification.  It is understood that with modified chips purchased from unknown sources, Lin connected consoles to modified chip modules and used memory cards to store the executable files of the cracked versions of consoles to modify the operating system so that Switch consoles would not perform piracy checks.  

　To gather evidence, Nintendo placed an order with Lin’s online store and successfully got hold of a modified Switch console and a memory card on August 8, 2023.  After the purchase, the prosecutor and the police initiated a raid action on Lin on November 29, 2023 and further searched and seized from Lin’s residence the 11 modified chip modules and 9 flexible cables as evidence.  As revealed by the search result, there had been a total of 578 transactions conducted in Lin’s online store with illicit profits earned in a total amount of TWD4,788,761 throughout the period from January 1, 2023 to September 24, 2023.  Following the investigation, the prosecutor charged Lin with violation of the Copyright Act.  (Released 2024.08.01)
  /CCS