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Japanese man arrested for allegedly hacking Pokémon game to sell custom monsters


Police say the man illegally tampered with Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s save data.

According to machine translations of stories at NHK and the Asahi Shimbun, the Kochi Prefectural police arrested 36-year-old Yoshihiro Yamakawa on April 9th after cyber patrol officers caught him selling the characters online. In a seemingly parallel case back in 2021, Japanese police arrested a man under the same law for illegally altering the save data of PokémonSword and Shield. Police suspect that Yamakawa’s total profit amounted to millions of yen (equivalent to anywhere between tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars), and an investigation is underway.

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