World of Warcraft player receives death threats for exposing Taiwanese botting mafia

Routinely hunting bots in World of Warcraft, a player has shown up on the radar of what he claims to be a botting mafia. The player in question is YouTuber MadSkillzzhc, who has lately been on something of a crusade against the systemic botting problem on hardcore servers — tracking them down, killing them to put a dent in their botting activities, and reporting their profiles.

Rather than individual players trying to get some money out of botting, there is an organized botting syndicate trying to capitalize on it, explains Madskillzhc.

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The botting mafia possibly makes around 3 million USD a month off World of Warcraft

Historically, botting has been a problem in almost any live-service game ever. Notably, outside of trying to game the leaderboards, botting provides a financial prospective in titles where premium currencies can be farmed in-game.

A cursory Google search will tell you there's a big ecosystem of WoW Gold mediated by second-party sources. This does give us some clues on how big the real-money trading problem is for games like WoW and why botting has lucrative financial incentives for any unscrupulous player.

Bot scripts are sophisticated enough to automatically avoid some means of being outsmarted (Image via Blizzard Entertainment || Youtube @MadSkillzzhc)

It's a big enough financial incentive to form an entire Botting Mafia setup based in Taiwan, says MadSkillzzhc:

"He (the informant) explained to me that this botting mafia is not running four bots, or six bots, they're running Twelve Thousand. Twelve Thousand bots. (...) He also explained to me that these guys are not only running their bots locally. That means they are using warehouses, but they also utilize the Cloud."

The "he" here is MadSkillzz's informant, a Swedish botter who claims to make $2000 monthly from running six bots in World of Warcraft. Based on this estimation, the Taiwanese botting mafia might make over $3 million a month, which could be a profit margin of $2 million after removing operational costs.

According to the same informant, this organization uses multiple variations of privately developed botting software, such that a ban wave from Blizzard only affects a fraction of their live bots at any given time.

Last week, MadSkillzzhc put out a video titled This Will Be My Last Video! He explained he wanted to stop chasing the trail of this botting outfit due to the severity of the death threats he'd been getting and the fact that he was doxed to the botting syndicate:

"Throughout the process of creating these videos, even though I have had fun doing it, I have received death threats multiple times. (...) I thought I was just killing bots, and I didn't really affect anything, but there's apparently an entire movement now where people are killing bots across all of the hardcore servers, and this is affecting the mafia."

However, MadSkillzzhc has since reversed his decision, and his crusade against the alleged botting mafia continues with his new exposé.

In conclusion, it's important to note that the alleged botting mafia doesn't operate exclusively in World of Warcraft. As per the anonymous informant, they have separate botting firms in several live-service games including Diablo 4, Diablo III, Last Epoch, Path of Exile, SWTOR, and Pokemon GO.