Leakers have been a headache for companies for years. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have struggled to stop them, as they want their most important announcements to remain confidential until the right time.
Don McGowan knows this very well, as he was a former legal advisor for The Pokémon Company. Recently, he shared one of the funniest anecdotes he experienced during his career at the company.
He recounted how he stopped a young Pokémon leaker with a phone call to his mother. With this, he prevented the inexperienced informant from committing a crime and avoided a group of lawyers taking legal action against him. His strategy was effective, as the leaker stopped his activities after the scare.
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The career of a Pokémon leaker ended in an unexpected way
During a conversation with Bloomberg, McGowan shared an interesting story related to Pokémon leakers. One of his most peculiar cases involved a boy named Andrew, who found a way to get valuable information about the series to share online.
However, his leaker career was short-lived, as McGowan identified him and called his mother to warn her of the legal risks of what her son was doing. The lawyer’s goal was to persuade the woman to stop her family member's activities before it was too late, which yielded good results.
"When I was at Pokémon, a kid discovered how to extract images from the card game. He found a developer icon and said, 'I found a new Pokémon.' This kid included his email, and because of the way Pokémon created accounts, when we got his account, we got the father’s information, which included a phone number,” McGowan explained.
The lawyer didn’t hesitate and used the information to contact the boy’s family, whose age was not revealed. He then spoke to his mother and gave the leaker a good scare, who feared repercussions from The Pokémon Company and Nintendo.
"So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew is doing on the computer.’ She says, ‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ (...) She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’'” the lawyer added.
He then recounted that, while the call was happening, Andrew posted several messages on his social media, acknowledging that what he was doing was wrong and that he wouldn’t do it again. This effectively ended the young leaker’s career once and for all.
“'Pokémon just called my house,' 'What the hell is a general counsel?' and 'I now know what I did was wrong, and I’ll never do it again.' Which was fantastic,” narrated the lawyer.
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