Italy’s financial police say they have successfully busted a ring that specialized in importing bootleg vintage video game consoles from China. According to the Italian authorities, the thousands of counterfeit consoles also contained millions of popular video games from the ’80s and ’90s.
“Around 12,000 consoles on which more than 47 million pirated video games were illegally stored were seized, for an estimated value of more than 47.5 million euros ($52.5 million),” head of the economic crime unit for Turin’s financial police, Alessandro Langella, told AFP (via TechXplore).
Popular games like Mario Bros. and Street Fighter were allegedly included with these consoles, which they say were imitations of Nintendo, Sega, and Atari machines. These were originally imported into Italy, but after they failed to meet European technical and safety standards, police began investigating the group bringing them into the country. Nine people were eventually arrested and they could face up to eight years in prison for the crime of trading counterfeited goods.