Tag: Counterfeit

It may not surprise you, the enlightened MMO Fallout reader, to hear that none of Epic’s roughly one thousand (Chinese and otherwise) defendants showed up or even answered the summons to appear in court regarding a lawsuit for Fortnite counterfeit merchandise. I talked about this briefly at the end of April and haven’t issued much in the way of updates because there hasn’t been anything substantial to talk about.

By the way, I’m not joking that this lawsuit started with roughly a thousand defendants. 923 in fact of which nearly 200 are included in this judgment. Over the course of the last two months, Epic has been slowly dropping defendants from the list, presumably the random accounts that could never be tied to an actual person. They were successful in forcibly transferring domains, freezing assets, and more.

The good news for Epic is that none of the thousand defendants bothered to answer the summons or show up, making it a whole lot easier to get the judge to sign an order of default judgment which Judge Guzman did on June 27. Far from simply imposing a permanent enjoinder on defendants from counterfeiting more of Epic’s products, and good luck enforcing that on some pop tent company in Shenzhen, the order goes quite a bit further. Judge Guzman awarded Epic Games $1 million in damages from each defendant.

He also ordered that Western Union must within two days permanently block all money transfers to the defendants. Ebay, Paypal, ContextLogic, and AliPay (and all of its related entities) have been ordered to permanently restrain all accounts associated with the defendants from transferring any money within two days. All monies within the accounts connected to the defendants has been seized and will be paid out to Epic and until the judgment amount is fully paid all new accounts created by the defendants will be seized and funds transferred to Epic as well. Epic also has the authority to serve any financial institution that is identified to have been accessed by the defendants, with the financial institute required to freeze their assets, remove their ability to transfer funds, and release all monies held on the accounts to Epic to ensure full payment.

As always, the legal documents have been uploaded to the MMO Fallout Google Drive, at our expense, for your perusal.