The Chicken Drumstick Gang

Speaker 1: How did Catfish get away with all this?

Speaker 2: So Catfish got away with it because he knew what it was doing. He told me that since the very beginning, he was very careful what he told his collaborators. He was very careful what information he put out there. He he was careful with us too. He asked me to use Catfish instead of his, instead of the nickname that he was using with his collaborators.

Speaker 1: So it's a couple years ago, and this computer developer is playing an online video game. A shooter called PUBG. And as is the case in almost every game, but especially online shooters, there are a ton of cheaters in this game, tons of folks cheating. And the developer thinks to themselves, you know what? I could probably develop some cheats. And judging by just how many people are cheating, there would probably be some money in that. So the developer, he tries. And it turns out he's like really good at this video game cheating thing. And he says, I think I can make a buck doing this. And it turns out that the developer is right. And this little video game cheating project that he starts out with grows into something I doubt even he could have imagined at the outset. Until the point, years later, when this happens.

Speaker 3: It was game over for what Chinese authorities call the world's biggest gang of video game hackers. Recently, China announced a major esports cheating bust. 10 were arrested for selling cheat software used in best selling game titles like Call of Duty. Luxury cars were among the assets seized from an illicit enterprise raking in more than $70,000,000.

Speaker 1: But after the dust settles, after those arrests, after all the headlines, after the top members of this infamous video game hacking group had all been arrested, a journalist named Lorenzo gets a message from none other than the original developer, who it turns out hadn't been caught after all, who was not amongst those arrested, who was still free, and now wanted to share his story under an assumed name for his safety, Catfish. So naturally, we had a lot of questions for Lorenzo, and he was gracious enough to give us his time. In the game PUBG, when you win, it's called chicken dinner. As in winner winner chicken dinner. Which is why the cheating ring chose a chicken drumstick as their logo, and why the authorities chose that as the nickname for the gang at the heart of the biggest video game cheating ring bust in history. This is the chicken drumstick, with motherboard senior staff writer Lorenzo Franceschi Bicaraj, frequently appears on the excellent podcast Cyber. Here, on Hacked. So there are a lot of different ways you can cheat in an online shooter. There's the obvious one, aim bots.

Speaker 2: Like, the cheat essentially allows you to aim without actually aiming. Like, it it aims for you. So the target the, you know, your gun just automatically locks onto an enemy and shoots shoots the enemy.

Speaker 1: There's wall hacks.

Speaker 2: Which is a very useful feature because it shows, your enemies moving around, the map. And not just the map, like, you know, moving around in front of you even when they are behind the wall or other obstacles.

Speaker 1: And we don't really know which one Catfish started with. We don't really know much about who Catfish was before he was Catfish.

Speaker 2: So Catfish Catfish's story before they become before he becomes Catfish is is very much a mystery. What he told me was only that he works in tech, that he used to play video games, and he he loves video games. And at some point, he was playing with his friends. He was playing PUBG with his friends and they noticed that there were a lot of cheaters. And as a developer, he got curious. He essentially wondered how hard it is to actually make a cheat. So he started developing in his, in his free time as a as a hobby, as a project, as a weekend project, so to speak. Then he saw then at the time, Tencent launched PUBG Mobile, for iOS and Android, and, Catfish got curious. It's like, what's, how hard it is to make a cheat for mobile?

Speaker 1: And at

Speaker 2: the time, there weren't that many cheats for mobile because, you know, mobile games were not that that popular yet, and, it was just easier to buy cheats for the PC versions. So he developed the cheat and he realized that it worked and he realized that there weren't that many out there, that many competitors out there and he thought, well, maybe I could do this for work. And, he started, like, frequenting some forums and Discord channels where other cheaters would discuss how to develop cheats and how to sell cheats, and he quickly found a business partner to to start selling his cheats.

Speaker 1: How did you confirm that this person who reached out to you was actually the person behind this operation?

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's a good question. And that was, the first thing that I I thought because the way that this worked the the way that this happened was that Catfish reached out after we wrote, like, just a short story on the news that everyone was writing about of the bust of this ring. And this guy reaches out to me and says, hey. I'm the one act who actually is behind this whole operation. And my first reaction was like, no. You're not. There is no way. Like, I do not believe you. This is some sort of a troll. And, you know, unfortunately, it's, these days, it's very common for people to approach journalists with the goal of tricking them into publishing you know, stories with false information in them. So we were very careful, and one of the first things I asked him was, okay. Is there any way you can prove this? And it turns out that he actually had a few he was able to provide a a bunch of evidence. One of them was that he showed me a control panel. He showed me that he could log in to a control panel for the domain that was a cheatcheatninja.com, which was the main website that they used, to distribute the cheat. So he's he essentially proved proved that he was in control of this domain. He also showed us a video of a Slack channel where, he was the administrator. He also shared a cheat that he had developed for, Call of Duty Warzone mobile, which I showed to someone who works in in anti cheat, and they said that it was indeed, you know, a real cheat. So, essentially, he he gave us a bunch of evidence that that, you know, strongly supported the his claims that he was the person behind the behind the operation.

Speaker 1: In China, there are about 650,000,000 mobile video game players, making it dollar for dollar pretty much the most profitable gaming market in the world. Case in point, Tencent, the company that owns and operates the mobile version of PUBG, Peacekeeper Elite as it's known in China, is worth about a half $1,000,000,000,000. Which is all to say that when you start developing cheats for one of Tencent's games, you are entering into an arms race with an incredibly well resourced opponent. Which is where Catfish pretty quickly finds himself.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That was one of the most interesting things that Catfish told me. You know, he said that despite the money, it was a very stressful life because Tencent would constantly update the game, would constantly put out new detection systems, new new detection rules to find cheaters, to ban cheaters, to make it harder for people to use cheats. So his was really just another software development company. They had to update the software constantly, always be on the lookout for any updates that Tencent would put out. And he said it was very stressful, especially at the beginning when it was basically just him. He wasn't sleeping well. He was, you know, he had angry customers asking for their money back.

Speaker 1: So at this point, because of all the, like, regular maintenance required, instead of a one off fee, Catfish is charging a recurring monthly subscription for access to these cheats. So like all monthly subscriptions, the revenue starts to really stack up quickly, but so do the customer's expectations.

Speaker 2: And remember that these cheats are not very cheap. We're talking about, you know, cheat sheets ranging from $5 to $15 a month. So the you know, it's decent money, and people obviously don't like to pay for stuff that doesn't work.

Speaker 1: So what's a person to do? And they're trying to run this business. And the demand for their product is greater than their capacity to produce it. When you can only stretch yourself so thin, you expand.

Speaker 2: So what he did was to hire more people. He realized that he couldn't do this on his own. He needed more help. And so he put out a call for people to join him, and so and soon he got more developers.

Speaker 1: So cheating in video games, Specifically online games. For anyone that doesn't know or maybe hasn't tried to cheat in a video game in a long time isn't like video games cheating, maybe used to be. You're not entering up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, and getting a bunch free lives. You're not picking up a little GameShark cartridge, as was the fashion in my day. Because the games are all online, it's a lot more technically difficult on the back end. And because the people hosting those games actively don't want you doing it, that already difficult thing then gets even more difficult.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So at the beginning, Catfish and his colleagues, developed a cheat that was essentially a separate app that would launch on an Android phone on the Android device, and this app would virtualize the game. So within this app, you would run both the cheat and the game itself, which would make it harder for for Tencent to to detect the cheats. But at some point, Tencent got got better in their anti cheat, detections and were able to find this, were able to, like, counter this and, ban cheaters. Catfish had to change his tactics, and he realized that he could only do this by routing the device, which means essentially giving the the device owner full control over the phone, the ability to install, to sideload apps, to change, you know, change how the operating system runs and, essentially, gain what what is called as root privileges. This is a challenge because it's not that easy to root an Android phone. It's possible. You know, there are online guides, obviously. People can just follow these online guides, but it is an extra step that some people are not willing to take, just for cheating. So so it was a big, it was a big blow to his operations, but eventually, they were able to keep making money even with this new system.

Speaker 1: So on one hand, you've got this just colossal pain in the ass developing the sheets to begin with. But that's just the product. Then you have the question of distribution. Like a lot of businesses, Chicken Drumstick starts out with word-of-mouth. Then they start working with resellers essentially independent salespeople, folks who buy the cheats and then resell them in new markets at a profit. Almost like they're in the import export business, but there's not really any importing because the product is digital and it's a dubious legality depending on where in the world you are. But before long, this kind of independent decentralized distribution chain starts to strain under the weight of the whole operation. And Catfish decides, we gotta build a permanent home. We need like a storefront. We gotta build a brand.

Speaker 2: Initially, they approached the marketing of their cheats sort of in a almost, sort of almost in an organic way. They they had resellers. They posted on forums. It was like, sort of like, people talking to other people and recommending this cheat. There was not really there wasn't really a central place where you could find this cheat. But at some point, especially after the they needed to launch the rooted the the root, cheat, they they realized that they needed more they needed more publicity. They needed to be a little bit more public to attract more customers. So they rebranded. Initially, the cheat was called Sharpshooter. They realized that that was also used by another cheat, so it was creating confusion among customers. So they just rebranded to CheatNinja, launched the website, and and sort of revamped their whole operation.

Speaker 1: Cheatninja.com. And cheatninja.com is a hit, a very profitable hit very quickly. And if we look at old cashed versions of cheatninja.com before it goes down, we can get a bit of a sense of the products that they were in the business of selling. It starts out with PUBG Peacekeeper Elite. But the enterprise pretty quickly expands into other games. Games with a bigger footprint in different geographies, with a clear eye towards, you know, expansion.

Speaker 2: They focused on China originally because China is such you know, it's the world's biggest game games market. And especially, there's a lot of mobile gamers in China. I didn't realize this, but in the research of, the research that I did for the article, I spoke with a with an analyst that we ended up not quoting. But he told us that, that in China, it's very common for people to play on mobile phones because a lot of people don't have PC PCs. Maybe they play in school or during, work hours, you know, they're at the office. So they just, play for a little bit on their phone. So it's it's very commonly it's a it's a cultural thing. It's very common to play on phones. So for so for Catfish and his colleagues, this was really a market ripe for for domination. But when PUBG became less popular, after a couple of years, they were losing well, they were losing customers because people just were not playing PUBG as much. So they they moved into different games, realizing that, you know, making a cheat for one game is not that much different than making a cheat for another game. So their idea was really to expand into other countries, find new audiences, find new customers. They also hire the support people that would speak the language, in in, you know, like Arabic when they they spend it in The Middle East. So that's another aspect that's really interesting about cheat cheat companies or cheat organizations. You know? I don't even know if we could call in companies. You know? They're not registered or anything. But they need to provide support. So they need people almost on call 247 to answer customers who are angry that their cheat doesn't work anymore. So you need people that know how the system works, that can answer questions, and also that can speak the language of the customers.

Speaker 1: So in most of the world, there aren't really any federal laws against cheating in video games. Even, like, serial cheaters really only have to worry about, like, lifetime bans inside of the game that they're cheating in. The stakes aren't that high. There have been lawsuits, civil cases. Ubisoft and Bungie have teamed up for a lawsuit against a popular hacking ring on the grounds that the cheating ring's products, quote, impair and destroy not only the game experience but also the plaintiff's overall business and their reputation amongst their player communities. There have been lawsuits on copiera grounds. It was a really interesting instance when the FBI investigated a Counter Strike cheating ring, but that seemed to have more to do with match fixing because it was in esports. But generally speaking, you're only going to get in so much trouble creating video game cheats. Unless, of course, you're in one of the small handful of countries that do pursue criminal cases against cheaters. Australia, South Korea, where the government fined one Overwatch cheater $10,000 and another to a year in jail. But the place where you, like, really truly don't wanna be in the business of games cheating, even if it might be the biggest gaming market in the world, is China, which is where the heat on cheatninja.com really starts to ramp up.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think he I think at the beginning, he was sort of, naive. He felt that, you know, it wouldn't really get the attention of authorities. And, you know, you have we have to remember that in most places around the world, making sheets is not a crime. It's obviously something that is a little bit of a gray area. You know, you're still technically hacking. You're developing malware, but, you know, there's an argument to be made that you're not really accessing other people's machines. You're just reverse engineering code and then developing systems that allow people to to get around protections, but you're not really hacking anyone. So in most places, it's, it's like a violation of the terms of service. In some countries, including The US, gaming companies have, argued that you're violating their IP, which has ended up in a lot of lawsuits. Most of them end up with settlements, where the developers agree to pay back a lot of money, in some cases, millions. But in China and South Korea, it's actually a crime. Reverse engineering games and their code is is considered, hacking crime, and so people can actually go to jail for this.

Speaker 1: It's important to remember that for however much of this story kinda takes place in and around China, for however much it's already come up, Catfish, who started it, is not necessarily from China. Which would make what happens next in the story in 2020, probably pretty surprising to Catfish. In 2020, the police in the eastern city of Kunshan make an announcement. They have arrested 12 people charged with selling cheats for Peacekeeper Elite, PUBG. But the announcement was not that they had taken down CheatNinja. The announcement was that they had arrested people who were buying cheats from overseas personnel using bitcoin and then reselling them in China. They had arrested some of Catfish's resellers, who were buying cheats from the chicken drumstick crew. So suddenly, Catfish, with his significant customer base in China, realizes kind of the stakes of the whole operation Not necessarily for him, but for the people he works with and sells to.

Speaker 2: That's when he started being a little bit more he started being more paranoid. He started having a little bit more fear about his, future and the future of his, of his organization.

Speaker 1: Wherever he's likely from, he's selling something kinda dodgy. Where he's selling two, he's selling something illegal.

Speaker 2: At the height of their business, they were making around $400,000 a month. In in and most of it was in Bitcoin, if not all of it, actually, was in Bitcoin. So the number that the authorities, came up with, you know, the 70 or $77,000,000, or 75, was based according to Catfish, that was because it was accounting for Bitcoin's, rise over the years. You know, Catfish didn't claim that they made $77,000,000 directly. He said that, you know, by if you if you look at the what how Bitcoin raised increased in price, that was what they made. And he told me that he told me that clearly he could have, you know, he could retire now. He didn't really need to keep working, but he just likes technology, so he plans on on staying employed.

Speaker 1: So by this point, Chicken Drumstick is generating in and around 400 k US equivalent a month in Bitcoin subscription fees. Some of their customers, you know, these resellers have been arrested. But Chicken Drumstick and their main site cheatninja.com still have heaps of customers, heaps of monthly subscriptions. Their operation is still running smoothly. They still have a lot of people reselling their stuff. So while those arrests certainly aren't, like, good, it wasn't enough to slow things down for the core team behind the operation. Catfish and his right hand men. As Lorenzo mentioned earlier, Chicken Drumstick was deeply decentralized. That's part of how Catfish was able to get away in the end. It was anonymous, even the people at the top didn't necessarily know each other by their real names. But the fact that they didn't know each other by their legal names doesn't mean they weren't in the trenches together for years and years. That anonymity doesn't mean that they weren't still friends. And one of those friends went by the name of Nine Eyes. Just his username was the letter I nine times. And one day, Catfish gets a message from Nine Eyes, and he can immediately tell something is off.

Speaker 2: In January of twenty twenty one of last year, he gets a Catfish gets a weird message from, from his collaborator, you know, Nine Eyes, who later the Chinese authorities identified as he. So his colleague, Catfish colleague, reaches out and says, hey. I'm going to Shanghai on a trip. I won't be available for a little bit. And and Catfish was already suspicious because he thought because usually his colleagues were very good at telling him in advance when they were leaving or going on work trips or going on trips, and and this was unusual. But, you know, initially it was like, alright, that's, you know, that that happens, whatever. But then another colleague said that he had received a message from, I I I, with a with a link to a, like, a China's, eBay Taobao. Right? And, when Catfish looked into it, he he sort of realized that this was some sort of phishing phishing attempt. And he immediately he said that he panicked. He realized that there was something off, that it was something going on. He checked the logs to see, who had accessed the website, and he saw that, I I I had accessed it from a Chinese IP, which was unusual because him and his colleagues are always careful in using VPNs and proxies. So he immediately thought that these were these were were actually the authorities.

Speaker 1: Catfish starts to realize that his collaborator, Nine Eyes, who was not an arm's length reseller, but an essential part of the operation, who knew how it worked, had been compromised. And now, whoever was messaging him with Nine Eyes device was not Nine Eyes, which meant that whoever had caught Nine Eyes was now trying to catch him.

Speaker 2: But once they arrested he and Wang, who were sort of like his right right hand man, he realized that this was, you know, it was too late. They were really onto onto them. And, you know, he also felt sorry and felt sad for his colleagues because, you know, he claimed he claimed that they were essentially friends at that point. He never thought that they would end up in jail.

Speaker 1: And finally, years after he'd had that first thought that I should try developing a video game cheat, after the whole thing had scaled into something huge, things had finally started to get truly out of control.

Speaker 2: He said that he, you know, he wiped all the servers. He took the hard drives and, smashed them with a hammer and then threw them threw them away. You know, he really got scared.

Speaker 1: So Catfish looks over at the plug, and he pulls it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And decided that this was not really for him anymore. You know, it's fair to say that he's he's probably never gonna go to China or never gonna go to on a vacation there, just in case. I wouldn't, for sure.

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Speaker 1: So Catfish has pulled the plug on cheatninja.com. But people still want to cheat in games. And those people still know the cheat ninja name. And trademark law not really being a thing in most cybercrime, some knockoffs start to emerge.

Speaker 2: Yeah. This happens a lot in, the cheat the video game cheating world. Sometimes when there's an organization that's very, very successful, someone comes in, just copies the name, maybe even copies it copies the the actual technology, they just clone the cheat and put it out and try to ride the wave. They try to get the same customers. They sometimes it's even like a scam. You know, they actually don't provide the service and just get the money. In ChipNinja's case, because Katrice shut it down and there was still a demand for for their services, someone else stepped in and launched a clone. In one case, there were two I think there were two different organizations. One claimed to be the original one. They were calling themselves CheatNinja. They didn't really say that they weren't the original ones. Another one another one was more open. They clearly said, this is a clone of ChipNinja. We're not the original organization, but we're still providing same services. They my understanding is that neither of these had really the same amount of customers that the original ChipNinja had. Their quality didn't seem to be as good either. I I was in one of the Telegram channels, and there were more complaints about, the sheets getting detected and not getting updated, often enough. It just seemed like a smaller organization. But it still exists to this day. I I'm still in one of those, Telegram channels, and the the developer still posts updates. So so they must they must still be making money, this new organization.

Speaker 1: It's estimated that by the time Catfish pulled the plug on cheatninja.com, it had generated in and around $77,000,000 US. That's the number that the Chinese police reported. And with the money coming in through Bitcoin and its wildly fluctuating value, Catfish pegged that number as basically accurate. 400 k a month and $5.10, $15 subscriptions for these video game cheats. And for as much money as that is, and it's a lot of money, it's still an incredibly tiny fraction of the industry, online video games, that cheaters are going up against. We talked about the arms race between game developers and cheat developers earlier in the episode. And even if large legal responses are only plausible in some markets, still all this other stuff that these companies can and are doing to try and stop cheaters from ruining these games. Because if folks wanna play your game enough, they will let you do some pretty privacy invasive stuff to their devices. That's what it's gonna take for that game they love to run.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's I think it is a really interesting world because obviously video games are huge, you know, the gaming industry is bigger than Hollywood at this point. There's a lot of money to be made, and you can make a lot of money by making cheats as Catfish and his organization proved. So there's a lot of people who are motivated to create cheats, and some of them are just very good malware writers. They're very good reverse engineers. They're very good developers. They're very good at get at getting around the protections that game companies put in. And it's important to remember that in most cases, the anti cheat measures are sort of server server side. So the companies check, you know, check the behavior of of a of a player in particular, see if there's anything weird going on. But in most cases, they don't have access to the the people's the player's machine. That has started to change. Riot Games was, one of the first companies that really made a big deal, of their new anti cheat. When they launched it a couple of years ago, they said that it was a kernel level anti cheat, so it was running at all times. At the beginning, it was even running just when the player would turn on their computer even before they launched the game, which people were really freaked out by. A lot of a lot of security, experts criticized this, asking, like, do you really need to do this? You know, this is, like, even worse than an antivirus, basically, because, you know, at least an antivirus company is a cybersecurity company. Use you know, that's kind of the deal you strike with them when you install the antivirus. You know, you give them access to your machine in exchange for protection. But in this case, you're just playing a video game. Eventually Riot Games changed their approach and and allowed people to just turn on the anti cheat when the game turns on. But that was really the beginning of, that really opened up the the floodgates. I think a lot of companies were resistant to launching something like that, worried that, you know, their players would, their customers and their players would be freaked out by this level of access. But I think that's it's only that's the future, and it's already the present. Activision last year launched their own anti cheat system that's kernel level. It's called Ricochet. It came after months and months of, of just a lot of problems. Like, Activision was really struggling with cheaters, in Warzone, which is, I think, at this at this point, one of the most popular online games in the world. There were a lot of reports of cheaters there. Like, my colleagues played pretty often, and they saw cheaters. There were streamers that were complaining about it, like, people with, like, millions of followers on YouTube saying, you know, I'm quitting Warzone because there's too many cheaters. So Activision chose to take a step further and launch an anti cheat that actually has access to your whole system. And that way, it's that is, you know, the ultimate weapon for this kind of, for these, game developers because they can see why you're running on your machine. They can see if you're launching, like, an app that messes with the game, if if you're launching something that maybe they have, signatures for that they already know it's a cheat. Because, you know, as part of their war against cheaters, video game companies have pretty competent and large anti cheat teams that not only develop the anti cheat systems, but also infiltrate forums, buy the cheats, reverse engineer them, you know, keep an eye on this whole ecosystem. So it's, you know, it's it's a huge problem and companies are definitely starting to take it very seriously. But, you know, just like everything else in cybersecurity, there's no perfect system. It's so it's still a catamask games and and a lot of these cheat developers are are really good. And, you know, I think it's also I don't know this for a fact, but I would imagine that if you're good at making malware, maybe you don't wanna be in a ransomware gang because you may end up in jail. Maybe you wanna make just maybe you just wanna make cheats, which, you know, unless you're in China or South Korea, will not lead you to be in jail.

Speaker 1: We don't really know who Catfish was before all of this, so we can't really guess who he'll be after this. On one hand, messing around with games is how a lot of people get into development and hacking, so maybe this is just the story of the birth and death of a very weird career in programming. But considering Catfish's ability, his ambition, and the scale of what the chicken drumstick crew built. Odds are, he was doing something before all this. And now he's off doing something else. In some ways, this is very different than most cybercrime stories. The crime in question might not, depending on where you are, even be a crime. But it's got all the same, like, beats. The big powerful system, the people who start to wonder if they can kinda pull it apart, and all the chaos that ensues when they realize that they can. This is

Speaker 2: a really interesting world because, you know, in cybersecurity, we we are very focused on, you know, government malware, spyware, stalkerware, you know, zero days and vulnerabilities. And, obviously, those are really important topics that can really have incredible influence. Right? Like, you know, obviously, things like Stuxnet were are super important, but we we forget that there's this underground of of people who create cheats that are essentially malware developers, and and that's also how a lot of the people who end up getting into cybersecurity start. They start by by hacking their video games, by making cheats. And again, this is a huge industry. The video game industry is huge, and so there's just gonna be more and more cheaters and cheat developers. And, it's just an interesting cat and mouse game.

Speaker 1: Thank you for listening everybody. Huge thanks again to Lorenzo for being so generous with his time. Lorenzo often appears on Motherboard's own infosec podcast Cyber, which you should definitely be listening to because it's great. This episode was based on his like super well reported piece on Chicken Drumstick for VICE's Motherboard. I highly recommend you check it and all of his other stuff out. His recent coverage on, cyber warfare situation unfolding in Ukraine is, like, honestly essential. Big old shout out to our pals, new and old, on Patreon. If you'd like to support the show, patreon.com/hackedpodcast. Thank you to Trent Bessel, you jumped straight to the front of line. Thank you for your very generous support. Frank Turpel, thank you for your generous support. James Duff, thank you. Inge, thank you. And Bradley Scheuer, thank you so much for supporting the show. Your support means the world. Our pal Scott couldn't make it for this episode. He sends his love. If you like the show, if you even if you even tolerate the show, spread the word, like, subscribe. We've been noticing a really fun uptick on our downloads on Spotify. If that's where you're listening to this, let's just keep it going. Why don't we? Like the show, give it a give it a rating. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Hacked, and we will catch you on the next one.

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