Somewhere on the Island of Oahu, October 19th

Freeman checked the online activity for all the spiders he had set up using a technology he grabbed from a private ProgHub page.

Snatching that code was as easy as ever, because ProgHub doesn’t know how to patch.

The code needed to be refactored for his needs, but since the author posted all the source code and libraries, it took far less time than it would have otherwise.

Only 994 hits?

Freeman couldn’t believe there were less than one thousand Magis in the world of the Colossal Machine. The last figures he’d checked stated there were well past thirteen million active players and rising every day. Either there was some kind of mass-extinction event Freeman had not heard of, or that rank was one of the rarest and the most difficult to achieve. He had witnessed the evolution of Pretzelverse Game’s lax security practices to something even more robust. Freeman was certain these numbers were correct, but he had to be sure. He pulled data from all official and non-official website, as well as a site called CMUptime, a site that reported all public statistics. The only drawback was the information on that site tended to be outdated since the last expansion.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

994—the count is correct. I will correlate back tomorrow, but I think I have an accurate count.

Next, he checked his scrapping data and found 901 of them had registered email addresses and social media accounts. He used another spider tool to capture all possible correlations to grab other real-world information such as names, birthdays, and sometimes addresses and phone numbers.

People leave a wealth of information for me to find.

“I love it when people make my job easier,” Freeman said, laughing.

By the end of the evening, he had to be able to dox more than five hundred users. He cross-referenced those users with the database he had dumped earlier for the Magi world site, where he’d been so rudely insulted earlier.

Time for some further analysis.

Further examination revealed the Magi world database not only had real names, addresses, and card information. But it also contained fields for social security numbers, credit scores, and other things like the percentage of available credit and online shopping histories.

They are not only profiling their users—they are seeing when it’s the best time to steal their identity.

As Freeman sifted through the code, he acquired from various ProgHub repository pages, he spotted something unusual. References to a repository called Bad Actor Punishment appeared on the list.

What can this be? Freeman thought.

As Freeman scanned the code, he gasped

I think I just found a suitable delivery system.