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"Free Activation"? Looking for an explanation (lemmy.ml)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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I noticed a lot of game repacks provide the installation files, but then require you to get a "free activation" to actually play the game.

What exactly is going on here under the hood and why can't the crack provider supply a traditional crack or keygen?

EDIT: This seems to be specific to Denuvo games. I'm going down the rabbit hole and people are forced to queue up for what I'm assuming is the equivalent of a serial key? that ties directly to their steam account....which seems like a great way to get your steam account banned.

Requirements to download the discord server's proprietary game launcher and bypass all security features on your PC.

Seems insanely sketchy and overcomplicated. Am I completely misunderstanding this?

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[–] [S] 9 points 8 months ago (1 child)

It absolutely does and I'm not remotely interested in trying, but I'm also curious. There's large communities and major repackers involved.

I'm hoping somebody from this community has an experience with that community they can share.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    From your description, 99% certainty this is a scam that installs some kind of malware along with whatever unlocks the ... crack.

    Could make you part of a botnet, could be a rootkit, could scan for ids and PID and steal your identity, hijack your accounts, could install a BTC miner, etc etc.

    You're right, there is no reason whatsoever to need a crack to connect to anything else.

    Maybe for DRM spoofing purposes it might involve a step where you set up a kind of local fake approximation of a DRM server to do a fake authentication to, something like that, or persistently running a spoofed fake authentication server, but there's 0 reason for that to not be entirely local and self contained.

    Functionally, this is a cracker org doing their own DRM, by hijacking an actual DRM.

    Which... is astoundingly ironic, but I've seen similar shit amongst various cheat engine / hack developer groups, scam crypto games, various GTAV/RDR2 modding communities, etc.

    If you did even just join the Discord server, nuke that that Discord account asap.

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