CIA spent $10m to arrest Eve Online user role playing as a major uranium, weapons, and drugs manufacturer

The war on drugs and major crime took a new direction last night after a SWAT team breached the residence of a suspected major criminal, backed up by police helicopters, and a full HAZMAT team from the Office of Nuclear Energy. Their intel turned out to be correct, in a sense, until it was discovered to be in the virtual world of Eve Online.

CIA Spokesperson, Julia Thomas, in a press briefing issued an apology to the local community for the mid-night disturbance to the neighbourhood in downtown Texas. Residents were stunned when their front gardens became a scene from a major action movie, with helicopters lighting up the sky, armoured vehicles roaring down the streets, and chemical weapons lorries setting up shop outside the community duck pond.

“Even though our information was not entirely correct, we would like to remind the greater community that we are committed to fighting organised crime in all forms.” Julia Thomas commented as she concluded the interview.

Information requests have since revealed that the CIA had been actively monitoring online chat, messaging, and popular VOIP program Discord for criminals taking their work online. The system reportedly scans traffic and communication for keywords and the Eve Online player turned out to trigger many major red flags which launched a full fledged $10m investigation and operation to apprehend the individual. Many in the wider public have been thoroughly alarmed at the massive intrusion into their personal online activity sparking numerous lawsuits.

Declassified documents released by the CIA as a gesture of goodwill in the defense of their actions, showed the individual known in-game in Eve Online as “Best Cocaine Prices” (yes that’s his name!), acted and spoke just as you would expect a major drug lord and arms dealer would do and took his role play very seriously. He would share plans, schemes, scams, and barter for many hours each day in between his other hobbies of fighting in chat rooms over anime adaptations, among other things. Most is heavily redacted, apart from the numerous animated pictures he shared, quite a collection, many only had to be censored for nudity.

Included in the thousands of Discord logs were comments on how well his drug production is going and the amazing profits he is making by dealing arms of all kinds (lasers were mentioned which should have been a giveaway to the agent who combed through them). The biggest flag to the CIA task force turned out to be the uranium enrichment program he has set up to make nuclear reactors (in game of course, turns out the game has those as an in-game commodity duh!).

Best Cocaine Prices asked not to be named in press interviews but said he was quite flattered that the government took his role playing and his little operation so literally and it would be a fun story to tell at the next game meet up in Iceland. He was quite concerned over the enormous amount of money dedicated to taking his virtual empire down.

The CIA has since updated its training regimes to include greater clarifications and ways of identifying legitimate crime to help prevent such a situation from happening again. They have also terminated other operations which seem to have identified other Eve Players. Many things are legal in Eve Online, scams, pyramid schemes, drug manufacturing and trading, and corporate espionage just to name a handful so no surprise it flagged up, it is just surprising how long it took.