This is the script for my video, “Uncovering The Criminal Underworld Behind Minecraft” Uploaded March 17, 2024

Please forgive any spelling or grammatical mistakes that may occur in this script as I originally wrote this for my own eyes and did a minimal amount of spelling and grammatical correction.

The script may not be completely accurate to what I say in the video as I often improvise as i’m reading the script in the recording stages of video production.

For other creators,

This script is subject to copyright and I’m mainly including this as a free resource for inspiration- I love it when people take inspiration off my videos and I’m very lenient on plagiarism. I often take inspiration from other creators and honestly don’t mind if you take heavy inspiration from my scripts.

INTRO

Minecraft has existed for over 14 years and has since become one of the most popular games ever made with over 300 million copies being sold, it has been a staple in the video game community for many years with it spreading all around the world. But underneath Minecraft's innocent-looking community, there's something much darker, Minecraft has a criminal underworld of scammers, hackers, and even predators with this underground market being worth tens of millions of dollars with the owners of Minecraft seemingly doing nothing about it. 

MINECRAFT’S CREATION

So what got us to this point? Well to answer that we’ll have to go back to Minecraft’s creation back in 2009, where its creator, a man named Markus Persson, or Notch would release a very primitive, sandbox-like game where the player could build, mine, and do whatever they please with there being no restrictions, besides the players' imagination. The first early builds of Minecraft were very buggy, and clunky and didn't include many features, but after some development and insight from the community, this game would quickly take off with Mojang, (A Swedish company that notch used to publish Minecraft), reportedly bringing in an estimated 200 million dollars in 2012.

Things all seemed to be going well for Notch over the next couple of years with Minecraft becoming a huge success, selling millions of copies and bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars, until things would all change. It wasn't until early 2014 when Notch would tweet “Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.”. Although this reportedly being a joke at the time- Microsoft would quickly reach out to Notch with a 2.5 billion dollar offer for Notch to sell his 71% share of the company, reportedly because of much ridicule from the Minecraft fan base over things he wasn't doing right, which would prompt him to say “It’s not about the money. It’s about my sanity” showing how bored and disinterested he was with working on Minecraft. He would go on to accept this deal making him a billionaire with him officially leaving Mojang a few months after the initial transaction in November, 2014.

This was the year that everything would change- notch leaving Minecraft would mean that Microsoft would take full control over Mojang- completely restructuring the creative system and development hierarchy of the game, steering Minecraft in more of a profit-incentivized direction rather than a creative player-friendly one, these drastic changes would soon show through as Minecraft updates began to have less and less features as the years moved on with many players commenting on how bland the updates were becoming, as when notch was around, Minecraft would receive updates every few weeks to few months with many new features being added in each update- but when Microsoft took over, Minecraft would switch to getting updated a lot less, with updates only happening every 6 months to a year. This wasn't the worst thing that would happen to Minecraft after the acquisition as many poor managerial decisions under Microsoft’s direction would lead to the creation of the Minecraft marketplace. 

 Now, on the outside, the marketplace seemed like a great addition to Minecraft as it served as a way for aspiring developers to make texture packs, add-ons, or skins for Minecraft and sell said creations on a digital store called “the marketplace” for players to buy with mine-coins- a digital currency bought with real money that is primarily used on the Minecraft marketplace, that could later be cashed out by developers of these add-ons for real money, which, if done correctly, would be a great idea because it would be mutually beneficial to the player, Microsoft, and the developer. Things seemed to be going great for the first couple months of the marketplace’s existence with many players positively responding very well to the marketplace’s existence as it was also the only way for players on the Xbox or PlayStation versions of the game to get add-ons or custom worlds and items for Minecraft, which was not previously possible. Despite this, many issues would soon pop up in the marketplace like a hefty amount of scammers and shady or even malicious developers that would falsely advertise the content of a package, often promising some big feature in the package, whilst setting the price of said product to thousands of mine coins which can get up to hundreds of real-life dollars, this only gets worse when you find out that there have been many documented examples of this happening with players collectively getting cheated out of tens of thousands of dollars. One of the most prominent examples of this is mega mansion maps which often advertise a gigantic build and can get up to over 1600 mine coins when the only thing you get is a decently built house with some in-game cars. There’s more examples of this like broken X-ray texture packs which don't even work and can cost up to 500  coins and  Mojang has done absolutely nothing about it even though one of the marketplace's guidelines is  “no false advertising- or no misleading players” which is exactly what many of these products do. This isn't even the end of it as another persistent issue on the marketplace is blatantly copyrighted or even plagiarized content as there are many rip-offs of games, franchises and even just stolen Minecraft mods and texture packs from the Java version of Minecraft that have just been copied by some of these marketplace developers, and these products seem to be selling tens of thousands of units whilst containing extreme amounts of solen material, such as the aether mod for the java version of minecraft- one of the biggest and most successful mods ever made being completely ported and sold on the marketplace. Although this add-on has since been taken down by Microsoft, there are still many other stolen mods and texture packs, one of them being the “faithful” texture pack which was basically just every Minecraft texture, upscaled to be a higher resolution, this texture pack gained a lot of drama in the last couple years as it was completely stolen and sold on the marketplace for an insane price. This isn't the end of it as many popular franchises like “Among Us” were also completely plagiarized and sold on the marketplace with many developers making unauthorized skins of some of the characters of these games and selling them on the marketplace for sometimes hundreds of mine coins, and I doubt that any of the people that made these skins have any sort of permission or license from the people or companies that own this material to be making and even selling this content for what seems like tens of thousands of dollars, and for some reason… Microsoft still doesn't seem to care as they have stated that they are not really liable for any copyrighted content found on the marketplace as they assume that the people making said content already have permission from the copyright owner, which is a very weak argument against this happening. The reason for this is probably that Microsoft is making tons of money from this as some of these skins have sold tens of thousands of units, and with Microsoft taking 50% of all sales from these developers, they are likely making millions of dollars off the marketplace. This gets even worse when you consider that these products are obviously trying to attract a very young audience as most of the cover photos for these items often have very bright flashy text predominantly using the colors green and red which are very similar to many of the thumbnails you would find on YouTube that are targeted towards kids- which is probably the main source of revenue from the marketplace as even Minecraft is still mostly played by a very young audience as it is very easy the manipulate this demographic into buying these products. This again begs the question of “Is Mojang actually responsible for any of the shady activity going on in the marketplace even though Mojang isn't the one actually making the content uploaded to it- even though it’s regulated by Mojang, monetized by Mojang and advertised by Mojang with creators submitting content often having to wait months on end for their content to get approved by Mojang which suggests that there are people at Mojang reviewing this content and giving it a pass despite the many copyright or false advertising issues surrounding this content so stay safe on the marketplace and spend wisely as you never know what you're truly buying.

we’re going to move on to our next topic of the video: Minecraft servers- which have been an essential part of the Minecraft community for many years with many players being able to congregate, make friends, and play games on these servers. But outside all the fun, there have been many malicious people trying to get an edge over other players Inside these servers for their gain, these people will develop hack clients to get an unfair advantage over other players whether it's being able to fly, see through walls or even aimbot. Despite this violating Minecraft terms of service and ruining the experience for many other competitive players, these developers or “hackers” have been battling the counter developers of key Minecraft servers for many years- doing almost anything to get ahead of the latest anti-cheat software, but cheating isn't the only thing that these hackers are up to, sometimes these figures do things that are a lot more dangerous to the Minecraft community… considering that the market for Minecraft servers has come to be worth tens to maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars, many server owners of these large servers will do almost anything necessary to make sure that their server is the best one to play on, they will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure that their server is the one with the best anti-cheat, the best games, and the best overall experience for the player. This competition between server owners has grown more and more fierce over the years with many server owners often going to extreme lengths to completely destroy competition by any means necessary like hiring paid hackers for thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to run dedoose attacks on their competitors  (a dedoose attach is where a hacker uses a bunch of fake users to completely flood the server’s database with fake user data, causing an overload on the servers, causing said Minecraft server to lag out of just completely crash, which can make the server often lose thousands of players, and the server owner to lose thousands of dollars. This rivalry would soon spark the rise of some of the most infamous hackers to ever exist in the Minecraft community, one of them being a player named Anacin Pi, (weird name I know) who would end up making millions of dollars off of creating a very dangerous dedoose software called Mirai, that could bring any server owner to their knees with it having incredible capabilities like being able to hack hundreds of  thousands of devices and use them all to flood a servers database with useless information, He would also create an incredibly strong anti dedoose service so that other server owners could pay him for protection. He would essentially become a paid hitman with many server owners going to him in hopes of taking out their competitors or just being protected, at the time he was the most reliable person on the market for dedoose protection and would begin to make it into an official business called ProTraf, through this business he would essentially bring the Minecraft server community to its knees, controlling the entire market.- this would lead this hacker to make millions of dollars off of this software. Despite the money he was making, he would eventually hand his software down to other hackers to continue his legacy because he eventually got wrapped up in an FBI investigation because of his illegal actions, but this isn't even the worst of it as other hackers do things that directly affect the Minecraft community and may even affect you. What I'm talking about is the stealing, and then buying and selling of Minecraft accounts through Minecraft servers. on the other side of the developers of many of these hack clients, there are the people actually using these hack clients to gain a competitive advantage over other players with hackers often having multiple Minecraft accounts so that if they get banned off a server on one account, they could just use another one instead, cycling out accounts for their own pleasure- this activity has created an underground market of hackers and sellers with the people selling these accounts often getting them through illegal tricks or methods- players will obtain these accounts through methods like taking advantage of data breaches in Mojang's database where hundreds and sometimes thousands of emails and even passwords get leaked or even just brute forcing it by using an algorithm to cycle through hundreds of thousands of password combinations with an email they took.  download mods for a popular Minecraft game called “Sky Block''. These download files are held in .jar files, which is the file format for Minecraft mods- but what players can do is disguise these files as .exe files which can carry many different kinds of viruses and exploits. When an unsuspecting player downloads these mods, it can give the hacker full access to their computer, being able to obtain and even sell a player’s Minecraft account, but this doesn't just go as far as Minecraft accounts as these hackers will often take control of other parts of people’s computers like their webcams, which they will use to take real-life photos of the player, or even steal more important data like social security numbers or bank account information, worse when you consider the fact that most of the people playing these servers are little kids, and have no idea what they could be downloading, or what the consequences could be. This is worsened by the fact that it is very easy for these files or links of malicious websites to be spammed in Minecraft chats or be posted on very large modding websites to be downloaded, as sky block mods are an essential part of the game and greatly enhance the player's experience. 

 The thing is, that it's not just the hackers that are out to get you, it’s also the owners of these servers that include many bad actors as we’re going to move on to our next topic, Pay-To-Win win servers. As you probably already know, Minecraft is played by millions of people with a large portion of its player base residing in Minecraft servers, this opens up room for many other kinds of scams being pushed into these servers with this all starting on a server called Hypixel, one of the first and most popular minigame servers ever created, having hundreds of thou sands of active players, and obviously, it takes quite a lot of hardware to keep a server as large as hypixel up and running with maintenanc e costs alone getting up to tens of thousands of dollars, previously relying on donations, the top devs at hypixel decided to create a way to monetize the Minecraft player base with buyable products like Ranks, game passes and loot crates- so that the player could be to gain access to exclusive, games, levels and even a colored in-game username for just spending a couple bucks either as a one-time purchase, or on a subscription, this worked great for hypixel for the first couple years with it being able to keep up and running and even make a little bit of a profit, but eventually, other server owners began to copy this strategy, but taking it, much further… These server owners would begin to do practices such as  marking up the prices of these products to extreme amounts, which for the high price, these loot crates and game passes would allow you to unlock items and abilities that are extremely overpowered. Basically paying your way up to success hence the name, Pay-To-Win with it being almost impossible to get to the competitive levels of these players without spending hundreds, and sometimes thousands of dollars. This would eventually pressure many unsuspecting young players to spend tons of money, just to have an equal advantage over the other players on the server. Seriously, the amount of stuff you get for buying this package can be absolutely insane with some of these passes giving you septillions of dollars in in-game currency. These server owners would even start to use scummier tactics, like setting up promotions on their websites that often mark down the prices of these passes by an extreme amount, but it’s all a lie because these owners don't actually mark down the prices, they just say something is 70% off during whatever promotion they’re doing, even though its always 70% off, which is a very misleading and scummy advertising strategy. This gets even worse when we look at the other method that servers use to take your money, gambling, or at least a form of it where some servers have paid loot crates that players can purchase which have a small chance of dropping valuable items, which many people have criticized as being a form of gambling- but the thing is that some of these servers have been caught completely lying about the chances on these loot crates with it often taking over 30 attempts just to win on a 50/50 chance on some of these servers, this gets even worse when you consider that most of the people playing these servers are too young or not even in a legal region to gamble. And these loot crates are often advertised to young players with some of these servers even being on the front page of the bedrock edition of Minecraft, often putting up bright red and green colors or figures to attract children, essentially, these servers are encouraging children to gamble. But this community isn't all bad as many YouTubers have made it their mission to take down these Minecraft servers- often finding and taking advantage of exploits to overinflate the server's economy and often completely shut down these servers, like the YouTuber Calc1 who found an exploit in one of these servers to duplicate these loot crates and give them out to the servers player base, this completely overloaded and therefore destroyed the servers economy. This is just one of the examples of these server owners getting what was coming for them as the cause of taking down these servers has grown dramatically in the last couple of years. So how is this even allowed, how does Mojang do nothing about these servers, why aren't they saying or doing anything?    

Well, that brings us into Minecraft's EULA policy, which should, in theory, make all these servers impossible. But instead is, what most players consider to be, the most ridiculous and hypocritical policy ever pushed by Mojang as the Minecraft EULA or end user license agreement is basically just Minecraft terms of service which states things like the selling of Minecraft products inside of Minecraft, regulations on uploading Minecraft content to youtube and what players are allowed to say in the minecraft chat.  this policy has recently been changed with a bunch of new rules like that players or companies can’t use products made by Minecraft for commercial purposes like the selling of Minecraft items, blocks, and other in-game content made by Minecraft without Microsoft's permission, which would directly make many of the servers we talked about earlier a direct violation of Minecraft terms of service by selling property of Mojang often without mojang's permission…- so why doesn't Mojang regulate this? why doesn't Mojang do anything about any of this?, servers have been around for many years and some people have said that there's just so many of these servers constantly popping up that Mojang couldn't possibly take them all down or even regulate them in a reasonable amount of time- especially since Mojang doesn't actually own the physical servers or storage centers that these servers are stored on, they really don't have much power over it besides blocking the IP addresses of these servers, or even taking legal action against these servers which is unreasonable because it would just take too much time and effort to get rid of just a couple of these servers.  When you go down a little on the EULA policy, you’ll notice the moderation guidelines which are actually enforced by Mojang- these guidelines basically state Minecraft’s terms of service, and even that Mojang has the right to completely ban you from your Minecraft account for just speaking in the chat, This can easily be abused with mass reporting of Minecraft accounts and false reporting and it is one thing if you get banned for saying the wrong things in public places like servers- but this even goes as far as players being censored and even banned for saying things in their own singleplayer worlds. Even after getting banned, these players will still have money drained from their bank account if they have any subscriptions to Minecraft’s services like a realms subscription which Microsoft does not cancel even if you’re banned from playing your own server. These rules and restrictions have been criticized by the Minecraft community many times as many people are bringing up the arguments that some of these rules are just ridiculous and violate the player's freedom of speech and many other players calling this the possible downfall of Minecraft as Mojang is still getting major pushback over these rules even to this day.

 Now let's move on to our final part of the video, The Minecraft community, Minecraft has such a large community that it's almost impossible to account for a couple bad people slipping through the cracks, and there have been many bad actors popping up in the community for the last couple years one example of this is the drama surrounding a  prominent Minecraft YouTuber named Clay, most commonly known as Dream. Dream originally started out as a very small,  unnoticeable member of the Minecraft community for the first couple of years of his career- uploading generic Minecraft videos that didn't end up getting that many views, until he would gain almost overnight success after uploading a style of video called “Minecraft manhunts” where one player has to beat the game whilst being chased down by another player. This series of his would soon be a cultural phenomenon as some of these videos would get upwards of hundreds of millions of views and much recognition within the Minecraft community. The peak of Dream's career would go on from late 2019 to mid-2020 until the rest of the internet would begin to uncover the true colors of Dream and his community. At first, his community would consist of only a small, often cringe player base with a couple of small dramas, but nothing too noticeable. Until things would all change for Dream as he would get accused of grooming, cheating, and even harboring a criminal- it was mid-2020 when Dream posted one of his most impressive speedruns to a website called speedrun.com, breaking a world record, and for those who don't know- a speedrun of a game is basically when a player tries to beat a game as fast as possible with speedrun.com being a website where players can compete on who can beat Minecraft the fastest, with this website being taken extremely seriously.  It was only a couple of days after Dream would post this speedrun that he would begin to get major backlash from the speedrunning community as some of the moderators of this website would soon find out that Dream was using mods on his game to boost his luck whilst speedrunning- which is a huge advantage as a big part of speedrun timing relies on luck. These accusations would just get worse as the moderators would find out that the real chances of Dream actually having the kind of luck shown in his videos was 1 in trillions, dream would go on to deny these accusations and even hire an accredited astrophysicist the back up the claim that he wasn't cheating. Despite the astrophysicist eventually saying that Dream up innocent, even making a full report about it, things would soon all fall apart as a couple of months later whilst sitting in the bathtub, Dream would tweet an admission to using mods in a lengthy thread where he would say that he was technically cheating, but that he was unaware that he had these mods running at the time. He would also later apologize for being rude to the mod team and would quit speedrunning, deleting all his previous speedruns- Many people are still sceptikal to this day, questioning why he even had those mods downloaded in the first place, or why he hadnt relized that he was using mods sooner, but, nonetheless- this still didn't mean that dreams track record was clean as he would soon get accusations of grooming and being a creep from a person named Anastasia where they made some pretty serious accusations against dream, this would be followed by even more accusations from many other people, saying that Dream was a creep, a groomer and even a pedophile, these accusations would soon be worsened as deam was often shown promoting weird and explicit content on many of his social media accounts with Dream even being accused of housing a known criminal going by the name of Manatreed- a friend of his at the time and an up and coming minecraft creator who would come to be known as an abuser and even had multiple criminal charges of domestic abuse and violence, this accusaion was taken very seriously by the community considering that he was one of dreams best friends at the time, even growing up together with dream, even with dream making up the name Manatreed and creating Manatreed’s social media accounts. Dream's explanation for this was that Manatreed had been previously struggling with homelessness and mental health issues over the previous year so Dream stated that he decided to take him in to help him- reportedly, being unaware of the domestic abuse charges, dream would quickly distance himself from Manatreed, and the whole conflict after the news, again saying that he didn't know who this person really was... Now about the grooming accusations- Dream would get his most serious accusation from a person named Amanda who claimed that Dream was being manipulative and creepy. This person also claimed that they were actively involved in a police investigation regarding Dream, even tweeting a photo of a police station. Now I'm not going to make any judgments on whether Dream is guilty or not guilty of these accusations as this is still a very new and controversial drama and I'll link the documents in the description that I've used so you can make your own decision on whether or not he’s guilty. So far, what I've gathered is that this photo of the police station is apparently all Amanda sent as there wasn't a police report filed with this being the last tweet that the account has made in over a year and a half, He would even go through his legal team to find the exact police station that the tweet was made in using the color of the walls, the security system and the plaque on the wall, and still found absolutely nothing. The Accusation made by Anastasia is also very flawed as there is still barely any proof of this happening besides some Snapchat messages which don't suggest any wrong-doing, And from all of these main accusations made against Dream, besides the 2 I just mentioned, the victim has very little evidence that Dream was doing this stuff- no leaked conversations that suggest anything malicious and the fact that there was never actually an official police report filed stating that any of this even happened-  Now, again, I'm not going to say if any of this is true or false- you can make that decision yourself, that's just the evidence I've gathered when researching this video, this topic is very nuanced and has a lot of points of view and I do not intend to hate on or even criticize the people in this video.

So what kind of conclusion can we draw from all this?

Minecraft is a great game, where you can have fun, make friends and do basically anything you desire. This game has brought many different people from different communities together which explains why Minecraft is the most popular game ever made and will likely continue to exist for many years to come- despite this, Minecraft still has many problems underneath its surface and you need to stay safe out there, avoid any scams or misleading information that may be sent your way, bye.