Destiny 2 hacks provider AimJunkies has been ordered to pay Bungie over $4.3 million in damages and fees. According to arbitration, Judge Ronald Cox says that evidence has made it clear that the site and third-party developer James May violated the DMCA. Bungie and AimJunkies have been embroiled in lawsuits since 2021, and their legal battle will continue despite this judgment.
Most of the $4.3 million award comes from trafficking violations
According to TorrentFreak, Judge Cox found that AimJunkies and James May bypassed Bungie’s technical protection measures in violation of the DMCA, stating that May testified many times that “he connected reverse engineering tools to the Destiny 2 process in order to reverse engineer it and developer a cheat for the game.” May also tried to get around bans that Bungie put in place after he was caught several times.
While May isn’t an employee of AimJunkies or its parent company Phoenix Digitial, the judge says that Phoenix Digital can still be held liable because it sold and profited from May’s Destiny 2 hacks and cheats.
The bulk of the $4.3 million award come from trafficking violations, where the judge found that that Phoenix Digital not only sold more than 1,000 copies of the cheats, but more than 1,000 copies of the “cheat loader that was used to inject the cheats into the Destiny 2 process.” Each of these 1,361 violations amounted to $2,500 in damages per offense, totaling over $3.4 million.
Another Bungie lawsuit against AimJunkies on claims of copyright infringement is heading to trial. AimJunkies says that Bungie violated its terms of service by reverse-engineering its cheat software, but Bungie hopes to use this arbitration judgment as part of its defense in the trial.
