An unidentified staffer at the ESEA gaming network has been fired for allegedly turning the company’s software into a secret Bitcoin-mining Trojan.

In April, ESEA (the E-Sports Entertainment Association) admitted that its software — which serious Counter-Strike players use to play each other in anti-cheating modes — had been altered to secretly mine Bitcoins. At the time, ESEA blamed an unidentified staffer. Now, as the company faces a class action lawsuit, it says that employee has been axed.

“The person responsible for releasing the unauthorized Bitcoin mining code has been terminated,” said ESEA co-founder Craig Levine in an email message. “We have been dealing with the entire situation in a responsible fashion to remedy those impacted and take steps to prevent this from happening again.”

Class action lawyers are trying to help them out. Last week they filed a lawsuit against ESEA in San Francisco Superior Court, claiming that the mining software damaged client’s systems and spiked their electricity bills.

Levine declined to comment on the lawsuit, but he said that the company has set up “a very reasonable claims process for people to submit verified damages to (graphics cards, power bills, etc.) and have reimbursed qualified individuals in a very fair fashion.”

So far the company has resolved 275 claims from customers who say they were damaged by the mining software, and the company is working to resolve another 15, Levine said. The Bitcoin-mining update may have been installed on as many as 14,000 computers.

Back in April ESEA initially called the miner as an April Fool’s prank, but it soon changed tune. The company then said that it had toyed with the idea of adding a Bitcoin mining option to its software, but that a rogue employee added the code “for his own personal gain,” according to Levine.

It’s possible to earn virtual currency by lending computer processing power to the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network, and the graphics processing chips you typically find on serious gaming machines are better at this Bitcoin “mining” than CPUs. In just a few weeks ESEA’s employee earned himself BTC30, or about $2,400 at today’s exchange rates.

In online forums, ESEA members said that a staffer named “Sean,” who used the pseudonym “Jaguar” was responsible for the Bitcoin code. Levine initially declined to name the person who was terminated in the incident, citing the pending lawsuit. But when we reached out to Sean for a comment, Levine answered the email and confirmed that he had been axed. “Since his termination, Sean’s e-mail has been setup to forward back to me,” he wrote.

Sean last signed into the ESEA network on June 1, according to his profile.

Update:

Here’s the complaint in the class action lawsuit:



E-Sports Entertainment Complaint