Italian Police Say They Have Busted A $52 Million Counterfeit Retro-Console Ring

Italy’s financial police say they have successfully busted a ring that specialized in importing bootleg vintage video game consoles from China. According to the Italian authorities, the thousands of counterfeit consoles also contained millions of popular video games from the ’80s and ’90s.

“Around 12,000 consoles on which more than 47 million pirated video games were illegally stored were seized, for an estimated value of more than 47.5 million euros ($52.5 million),” head of the economic crime unit for Turin’s financial police, Alessandro Langella, told AFP (via TechXplore).

Popular games like Mario Bros. and Street Fighter were allegedly included with these consoles, which they say were imitations of Nintendo, Sega, and Atari machines. These were originally imported into Italy, but after they failed to meet European technical and safety standards, police began investigating the group bringing them into the country. Nine people were eventually arrested and they could face up to eight years in prison for the crime of trading counterfeited goods.

Retro gaming has seen a boom in the last couple of years, and with collecting at an all-time high, a very lucrative black market for fake video game cartridges and consoles has grown over the years. These knock-off carts are becoming increasingly more difficult to differentiate from the real deal, although there are online guides and groups dedicated to helping you avoid accidentally buying a fake game or system.

In one notable example of the counterfeit gaming market, two hackers participated in an attempt to build a counterfeit Xbox One using stolen data, but they were eventually caught and they pleaded guilty. Back in 2011, Atari accused distributor Tommo of importing bootleg versions of its Flashback 2 plug-and-play console, and for a more recent digital-only example, fake Helldivers 2 game pages appeared on Steam shortly after the game launched to commercial success.