Japanese man arrested for allegedly hacking Pokémon game to sell custom monsters

Japanese police arrested a man after finding evidence that he illegally tampered with save data for the Nintendo Switch games Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, which he used to create custom characters that he sold on an online gaming marketplace.

According to machine translations of stories at NHK and the Asahi Shimbun, the Kochi Prefectural police arrested 36-year-old Yoshihiro Yamakawa on April 9th after cyber patrol officers caught him selling the characters online. Yamakawa, who used an online tool to modify the game’s save data, was arrested under suspicion of violating a Japanese law known as the Unfair Competition Prevention Act.

The police report, according to both outlets, states that the Japanese police cyber patrol caught Yamakawa…

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