Police bust $52 million counterfeit retro game trafficking ring in Italy

Police in Italy have made a number of arrests in connection with counterfeit game consoles. In other words, the cheap knockoff consoles you see listed in online stores that are loaded with hundreds of classic game ROMs.

Video game emulation has been a huge grey area when it comes to legality. In terms of game preservation, it’s important for the sake of making classic video games playable in the modern day, but it also falls under the technicality of stealing a license if you acquired the file to emulate it without owning the game first.

Regardless, some companies have taken to manufacturing knockoff game consoles filled with hundreds of emulated games and selling them for cheap. These can be pretty easily found with a quick search on sites like Amazon.

And, according to a report from AFP, nine people in Italy were arrested in connection with video game consoles like these being illegally imported from China and sold in Europe.

“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 USD),” police told the AFP.

This $52 million figure may seem like a stretch, though it depends on how the nine people arrested end up being tried. The 12,000 consoles are likely just a small fraction of where that estimate comes from, with the majority being related to pirated software.

Depending on how the court proceedings go down, this could be a landmark case in relation to emulation’s legality and how cases around it are tried.

That said, part of the reason for the arrest was the consoles in question not meeting European safety standards, something that makes this arrest stand out from other countries in which systems like these are sold.

Linus Tech Tips made an entire video exploring consoles like these, with his being sourced from AliExpress. There are so many of these knockoff consoles that it’d be hard to nail down what kind of model or price the consoles involved in the bust were, but the quality of consoles like these varies heavily.

At the time of writing, systems like the ones that resulted in Italy’s bust are legal and still widely available for sale in several other countries.