Every year, the Office of the United States Trade Representative invites rightsholders from various creative industries to nominate the foreign piracy sites and services they consider to be the most significant threats to intellectual property. The resulting list of notorious markets traditionally features an array of torrent indexers, cyberlockers, and unauthorized streaming portals that facilitate the unlawful distribution of copyrighted media. In recent years, the scope of these submissions has expanded to include hosting providers, domain registries, and other critical infrastructure intermediaries that keep these platforms online.
Last week, the Entertainment Software Association, which represents many of the world’s leading video game developers and publishers, submitted its latest set of recommendations to the trade representative. While the filing includes several familiar names that have appeared on previous enforcement radars, it also features a novel target that possesses no website, domain name, or public storefront of its own.
A Game Cracker as a Piracy ‘Market’
At the center of the ESA’s latest submission is an anonymous figure known as "voices38," who has been flagged as a primary threat to the video game industry. The industry group describes this shadowy operator as a persistent and highly skilled individual who specializes in defeating Denuvo Anti-Tamper, the robust technical protection measure utilized by at least nine major member companies of the ESA to safeguard their software releases against day-one piracy.
According to data cited by the ESA, indices such as Reddit’s r/CrackWatch attribute approximately two dozen cracked or fully bypassed games to the "voices38" handle. The gaming coalition emphasizes that this operator occupies a foundational role within the broader software piracy ecosystem, acting as the ultimate upstream supplier whose releases are subsequently disseminated by downstream entities, including digital repackers, public torrent trackers, cyberlockers, and specialized piracy forums.
In its filing, the ESA argues that treating only the downstream distribution platforms as illicit markets fundamentally misunderstands how modern software piracy operates. The organization stresses that each successful crack unlocks an entire secondary market for unauthorized copies of a given title. For games that no other cracker is able or willing to service, there would simply be no functional pirated copy available for these secondary platforms to host and distribute if not for the intervention of "voices38." Consequently, the trade group asserts that targeting only the downstream services overlooks the critical upstream operations that determine whether protected games can be compromised in the first place.
The lack of a public identity or a traditional homepage should not preclude the operator from receiving a notorious markets designation, the ESA contends. On the contrary, the group argues that formally listing an anonymous upstream cracker could catalyze international and domestic efforts to unmask the operator. Such a designation would focus regulatory and law enforcement attention on identifying the individuals behind the handle, preserving digital evidence, disrupting financial distribution accounts, and cutting off donation channels. It would also help coordinate strategic actions across the various forums, code repositories, peer-to-peer networks, and hosting intermediaries used to seed each new release to the public.
Ideally, the ESA hopes to uncover the real-world identity of the person or persons orchestrating the "voices38" handle, a pursuit shared by other entities within the legal sphere. Unmasking the anonymous cracker is also the primary objective of an ongoing civil lawsuit currently making its way through the American legal system.
Lawsuits and Persistent Distribution
Last month, Denuvo initiated legal proceedings against "voices38" in a U.S. federal court in California, subsequently requesting judicial permission to issue subpoenas to major technology platforms including Discord, Valve, and Reddit in an effort to uncover identifying financial and account data. While the ESA’s trade submission does not explicitly reference this active litigation, the parallel pressure campaigns highlight the industry’s intensifying focus on dismantling upstream bypass operations rather than merely playing an endless game of whack-a-mole with downstream distributors.
Despite the mounting legal scrutiny, the flow of cracked video games has continued largely unabated. Following a brief period of apparent quiet, "voices38" released bypasses for titles such as Atomfall and The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, alongside a dedicated crackfix for the Dead Space Remake.
These freshly minted cracks swiftly found their way onto mainstream torrent aggregators and cyberlockers, where prominent digital repackers quickly integrated them into compressed distribution packages. Among the most prolific beneficiaries of these upstream releases is the notorious repacking portal FitGirl, bringing the focus of the ESA’s enforcement campaign directly to another long-standing target.
Billion-Dollar Scale of FitGirl
Having already been targeted in previous notorious markets reviews conducted by the U.S. Trade Representative, the FitGirl repacking operation has once again earned a prominent recommendation for inclusion in the upcoming list. Despite proactive enforcement measures and domain-level blocking orders implemented in several jurisdictions—including Germany, Italy, and Spain—the site continues to operate with staggering scale and resilience.
According to metrics cited in the ESA filing, FitGirl’s repacking hub attracted approximately 41.77 million visits in August alone, continuing to offer a vast catalog of unauthorized video games published by ESA member companies. The association points out that FitGirl’s remarkable persistence demonstrates that past ISP blocking initiatives and prior market designations have failed to induce any meaningful remediation or voluntary compliance from the site’s operators. Furthermore, formal takedown notices sent by the industry group are routinely ignored, with zero infringing links reportedly removed between August of the previous year and August of the current year.
To illustrate the economic gravity of the situation, the video game publishers calculated the estimated financial losses associated with the platform down to the exact cent. Between March and August, the ESA detected more than 15.4 million distinct users participating in peer-to-peer torrent swarms for video games that had been compressed and distributed by FitGirl. Multiplying that user count by a standard retail price point of $69.99 per title yielded a staggering estimated lost market value exceeding $1.08 billion.
Other major distribution hubs exhibit a similar disregard for intellectual property enforcement. According to the ESA’s filing, platforms such as DODI-Repacks removed only a fraction of the reported infringing links, while the prominent Russian torrent indexer RuTracker complied with a meager 3% of the removal notices submitted by the industry coalition over the past year. To combat this widespread unresponsiveness, the ESA suggests that tracking complex financial movements, including cryptocurrency transactions routed through platforms with strict know-your-customer verification standards, represents a vital frontier in identifying and neutralizing anonymous operators.
Handheld Consoles and Digital Service Threats
This year’s review cycle by the Office of the United States Trade Representative features a specialized emphasis on high-quality counterfeit merchandise, colloquially referred to in regulatory circles as superfakes. Seizing upon this thematic focus, the ESA has directed attention toward a burgeoning hardware trend: handheld emulation consoles that come preloaded with vast libraries of unauthorized video games, framing them as the hardware equivalent of digital superfakes.
The association specifically nominated Anbernic.com, the official storefront for a widely distributed line of portable emulation devices. The ESA notes that these hardware units are routinely shipped with pre-configured memory cards containing hundreds or even thousands of pirated commercial video games, and points out that identical devices are frequently sold through mainstream e-commerce marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay.
Beyond traditional downloading portals and preloaded hardware, the ESA’s sweeping submission also targets digital marketplaces like G2A, FunPay, and Eldorado.gg, where user accounts and in-game virtual items are frequently traded. Additionally, the coalition targets hardware and software cheat developers, such as the creators of Cronus Zen. The industry group argues that sophisticated cheating devices rightfully belong on international piracy watchlists because they circumvent and undermine the core technological protection measures implemented to secure modern video games.
It now falls to the Office of the United States Trade Representative to evaluate these extensive industry recommendations and determine which entities will ultimately be codified into the final Notorious Markets list. With previous editions typically published in the spring, stakeholders and observers will likely have to wait several months before the official determinations are finalized and released to the public.
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