This is the story of four guys that are playing a video game and can't hack it can't recreate this. And then when they did, it was, Oh, my gosh, we can make a lot of money out of this. This is one of the most popular and profitable video games ever invented in the history of the world. The money that Anthony and the other boys made was staggering. It's mind blowing. Mm. Anthony was the smartest among us. He was like the best. I idolised him. Growing up in elementary school, People started to notice his mind being a little bit smarter, a little bit quicker when it came to like Electronic. So he was special from a young age. He was offered a job at Microsoft when he was a junior in high school. That was a big deal for us, man. He's going to make it rich by doing what he loved. Anthony was the technical mastermind. He created an application that would communicate with via servers, and it basically would send a message saying, Hey, I just completed a game because that's when you get kicked back a coin as a reward. Eventually, we just got to the point where we can move it on the cloud servers and may make this a lot faster. And so then they could distribute those applications over a network of many hundreds of computers. Send that message hundreds of times a minute for games that never actually happened. And that's when we could exponentially increase production at its peak. It could have been like $500,000 a day. One of the first things I bought was a car. I purchased a Mercedes AMG C L A. 45. I paid in cash. Anthony showered his family. I think getting the house for his mom was an accomplishment of all accomplishments for him. We asked him, of course, you know, Anthony, what are you doing? And he was like, I'm not doing anything wrong. Electronic arts did not approach federal government. We approached them. What drew us to this case was the amount of money that these kids were able to make. There's $16 million and there's Lamborghinis and Mercedes. On September the 17th of 2015, we executed search warrants simultaneously. They had no idea that federal agents are going to show up with their home. It's in the morning, basically just pounding out the doors and then greeted with shotguns in their faces. They were looking for father's related to the They have taken this way more seriously than I thought they would. We found a treasure trove of information, especially Eaton's Avery's computer, because he had every one of the chats that these guys had had. This is not going to end well. I didn't have this goal of seeing them to prison. What I wanted was to send a message out there. Hey, guys, this is illegal. We had big decisions to make. Are we going to enter a guilty plea or are we going to go to trial? Anthony understood that if he was convicted, he was looking at several years of incarceration. He was never going to take a plea. He was going to fight it. For the government to bring a wire mail fraud prosecution. They were going to have to actually prove that Anthony obtained money or property. That's what the case really boiled down to is where these coins these virtual currencies was that money or property in our position was they're not valuable. E. A sports can create these infinitely in the terms of service. It literally says FIFA coins are neither money or property, and that was a really big thing to us because we didn't believe they were going to be able to meet their burden of proof. And so we just began to prepare for trial pretrial. We had this belief that E. A. Would come in and testify. These coins have no value, but the EA sports representatives show up, and it was night and day. Oh, that's not at all what that policy means. We were appalled that these people were stealing our coins and the government's position was, these are valuable coins. These coins can be sold on the Internet. If this was not money or property that they were obtaining, then what were they getting paid $16 million While the jury was deliberating, we told him that we didn't have a good feeling about it. Based on the way the trial is gone, the very form simply read, We the jury find the defendant, Anthony Clarke, guilty as to count one as charged in the indictment. It was unreal, they said, guilty and before it could even process in my head. They had him in cuffs. I don't think he was surprised. He understood all along. This was a possibility. The next morning they called us and said, You can go and pick him up And my sister and I swooped by the court, picked him up and got the hell out of there and started focusing on what would the appeal to the Fifth Circuit looks like? And we thought there was a good chance that we would succeed. He was very positive. He just said, You know, I'm gonna go. We're going to fight this But I do have to go to jail. I'll serve my time and I'll come back and get back to creating software and stuff like that. February 24th was Anthony's birthday, and he went out with some friends and, you know, they drank. And he probably overdid it a little bit because, you know, this is the last birthdays be spending outside. But he also is taking medication. My sister called me that morning and said, Sean, something's wrong with Anthony. He's not breathing and I got there and she said, No, Sean, he's gone. He's dead. He passed away and asleep on February 26th, two days after his birthday. Anthony Clarke genuinely believed he had not committed a crime, and she just had this thing inside of him, where he refused to plead guilty to something he felt that he had not done. This is a very interesting open issue for federal law. Do digital in game assets constitutes something of value. There are money transmission laws which come into play here. There are tax implications. The purpose it is, was to figure out the exposure to E. A. To recoup the money and the losses that were here and to be a deterrent to others. At the end of the day, it's a numerical value in a computer. It's no different than the Jersey colour on one of the soccer players. It doesn't really exist.