Japanese police arrest a man after finding evidence of illegally tampering with Nintendo Switch game save data pokemon scarlet and Purplewhich he uses to create custom characters and sell them on online gaming marketplaces.
Story-based machine translation Japan Broadcasting Corporation and Asahi ShimbunOn April 9, Kochi Prefecture police arrested 36-year-old Yoshihiro Yamakawa after cyber patrol officers caught him selling characters online. Yamakawa used an online tool to modify the game’s save data and was arrested on suspicion of violating Japan’s Unfair Competition Prevention Act.
According to two media reports, the police report stated that It is said that the Japanese police cyber patrol team captured Yamakawa who was executing the order. Yamakawa offers deals on hard-to-train and rare monsters, such as “6 Pokémon for only $30,” on an online platform that sells game assets and characters.
As we noted in our 2022 game review , fighting and collecting monsters is unsurprisingly the main focus, and both games are packed with new, never-before-seen monsters. Players will undertake increasingly difficult raids to capture bizarre and hard-to-find monsters, with the goal of training, fighting, and in some cases, even breeding them. It turns out that some players are thirsty for rare Pokémon enough to buy them on the black market.
In fact, the demand is great enough that this isn’t the first time this has happened. In a seemingly similar case in 2021, Japanese police arrested a man under the same law for illegally changing the game’s save data. Pokemon sword and shield.as polygon In its description of the incident, it noted that hackers breached Pokemon Cheating in the game is so rampant that The Pokémon Company has begun cracking down on the practice.
Yamakawa allegedly sold his custom monsters for 13,000 yen (approximately $85) each between December 2022 and March 2023. Although Yamakawa reportedly admitted to the charges and told police “I do this to make a living,” the case remains under investigation. Police suspect Yamakawa’s total profits amounted to millions of yen (equivalent to tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars), and the investigation is ongoing.