In April 2019, Epic Games announced a number of new account security features that it plans to roll out later in the year, including email and two-factor authentication for new accounts. At the time, it seemed like a natural (albeit premature) evolution of the Epic Games store, but emails presented today as part of the Epic v. Apple lawsuit reveal that Epic's boneheaded account system has caused more headaches than we thought.

According to the email chain, Epic's problem was twofold: fake accounts were easy to create, and the so-called "clawback" option to disable games on other storefronts was not available.

Daniel Vogel, COO of Epic, said at the time, "We believe that the ability to resell accounts is what caused the fraud. The scammer creates a Uplay account, uses the stolen CC to purchase The Division, and then sells the account...The Epic account is disabled by the chargeback, but without the clawback with Ubisoft, the game is still available on Uplay, sold account will work.

He responded later in the thread to a statement by Chris Dyl, Epic's general manager of online services, that concerns about account security "have been raised by malicious vendors taking over other users' accounts and using their registered credit cards to pay for games He reiterated this point, noting that it comes up "when a malicious party tries to hijack another user's account and use their registered credit card to pay for the game.

"That's not real account security, and email verification is not the bottleneck in that approach," Vogel replied. 'The issue here is that stolen credit cards are being used. That seems to be the crux of the problem."

When asked how account security relates to this issue, Dyl explained, "It's super easy to create an Epic account, load it up with everything from free games to unauthorized payment methods for paid games, and sell it. The lack of actual game clawbacks on chargebacks further exacerbates the problem.

Epic's Scott Adams was more outspoken in his criticism of the store. He wrote, "Currently, the lack of email address verification and account security is not helping."

The rate of unauthorized purchases forced Epic to disable purchases of "The Division 2" and "Anno 1800" in May 2019, and eventually all Ubisoft games.

At the time, it sounded like a relatively routine technical problem - Epic said "we are experiencing problems with our UPlay integration" - but another email that surfaced in the Apple trial revealed that the "abnormal" fraudulent purchase rate of The Division 2 on the Epic Store was caused by an "abnormal" purchase rate of The Division 2 on the Epic Store. The problem was so serious that Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic, sent a personal email of apology to Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft.

"In the past 48 hours, the percentage of fraudulent transactions for The Division 2 exceeded 70% and approached 90%," Sweeney wrote on May 11, 2019, the same day Epic stopped purchasing Ubisoft games. Sophisticated hackers created Epic accounts, purchased Ubisoft games with stolen credit cards, and were selling linked Uplay accounts faster than we could disable linked Uplay purchases due to fraud."

"Fraud rates for other Epic Games store titles are less than 2%, and Fortnite is less than 1%. Therefore, 70% fraud was an unusual situation."

Sweeney said Epic would restore Ubisoft game purchases as soon as possible, but warned that it would take at least two weeks to implement the systems needed to do so; as Epic did in a tweet, he also took full responsibility for the problem and said, "We are committed to . to ensure our performance, all minimum revenue guarantees remain in place," and promised that Ubisoft would not suffer any losses because of the problem, effectively guaranteeing that "we are not going to lose any money.

The legal battle between Apple and Epic is a major one, with potentially major implications for how programs are bought and sold online. However, we also learned that Walmart was (and maybe still is) working on its own cloud gaming service, that Epic spent more than $11 million in nine months on free games, and that Fortnite alone made more than $9 billion in 2018-19 So that amount is a paltry sum in the grand scheme of things, and other completely unrelated but very interesting facts were also revealed.