In Kansas City, Missouri, a man has coordinated drug trafficking through his gaming console, according to the FBI. He is said to have offered an FBI source according to cocaine to a price per kilogram of $ 34,000. About the case had reported as the first "motherboard". The court documents that provide insight into the case are also online.
According to the documents, a US Federal Police Special Agent filed a search warrant in October for Sony Playstation vendor Sony to provide the suspect with user data.
The request to the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri mentions - in addition to its real name - the suspect's Playstation username. The man is described as a cocaine dealer in Kansas City, who coordinates his business through the Playstation and their chat service.
Chat messages, friend list, security data
Whether Sony has actually released the desired data is unknown. However, from the publicly available documents on the case shows what the FBI wanted to know from Sony. Thus, the federal police was interested in the games played by the presumed drug dealer, but also in his friends list. In addition, there was a demand for chat messages, including unsent drafts and generally deleted information, which may still be available to Sony itself.
Similarly, for the FBI classic account data of interest, including the postal address and phone number of the user, but also his passwords and his security questions, including answers.
In the game contacted
The FBI application states that the suspect had contacted an informant of the Federal Police during an unspecified online multiplayer game on Playstation via audio chat. Apparently the man assumed that he was safe when he communicated via audio chat in an online game, it goes on. For this reason, the man probably also believed that he could use the audio communication during the game to negotiate the details of a drug deal.
There are no indications that Sony has alerted the FBI to drug trafficking, or that the audio chat was recorded by the console or the game being played. The FBI request sounds as if the informant had made the contents of the conversation available to the Federal Police. Sony itself did not want to comment on the topic.
Officially, on 30 August, the FBI managed to attend a suspect's drug deal. On that day, the informant met with investigators in consultation with the man. At this meeting, the informant was actually given cocaine. The suspicious man is said to have also informed the informant at the meeting that he would later want to talk privately with him in the "game". This meant, according to FBI, the online multiplayer game for the Playstation.
Not the only case
According to the "motherboard" application for the search warrant shows that law enforcement increasingly asked console manufacturers, as well as manufacturers of other devices connected to the Internet, for user data.
There is actually a trend in this direction. Germany had been debated this summer over whether investigators should gain access to digital voice assistant data and smart home appliances. The current case is not the only one in which the FBI of Sony demanded the release of Playstation user data.
