SC2SEA.com - Starcraft 2 SEA eSports Community Site

**nirvAnA** · Fri, 8th-Jun-2012, 1:34 AM

What happened?

It was found that a well known top-tier player on the SEA server called "AsGChoBo" was actually a fabricated identity based on Korean "Semi-Pro" LoFseohyeon / vVvseohyeon who played under that account in nearly all his ladder games and tournaments which culminated in him winning one of the biggest SEA prize money tournaments, the "Masters Cup".

He carried on this identity deceiving site admins, his own clan, his own girlfriend and everyone in SEA for at least the last 6 months. Suspicions arose when the lesser rated chobo, surprisingly managed to beat some of the very best SEA players in succession, namely TargA, Ender, yang and Mafia with a total score of 9-1, winning the $300+ Masters Cup Tournament on the 3rd of June last Sunday.

Timeline

Day 1-3 - Led by game analysis by Rossi, Mafia and TargA - ChoBo was initially accused of map hacking. After many days of heated discussion with nearly 400 posts, the evidence proved inconclusive and if anything showed that he did not hack in many games.
Day 3 - The summary of all these posts can be found here, written up by crAzerk.
Day 2-3 - An anonymous tip of a possible smurfing theory is brought up to nirvAnA in a private message. He decides to investigate this and informs Rossi, Mafia, Revenant of the possibility of it as he had suspected something strange in the past too. nirvAnA does a preliminary "smurf test" on skype/bnet with Rossi observing, but somehow ChoBo/Hyeon managed to deceive them both. It was again Hyeon playing as chobo and unaware of that they got tricked into giving up the smurfing idea.
Day 3-4 The anonymous tipper also provides an old archived video, which shows chobo using different hotkeys from the replays which immediately peeks Rossi and Mafia's interest.
Day 4 Rossi looks through Chobo's stream list and notices Chobo had favourited a low profile Korean player, seohyeon. Based on a hunch, he takes a look at an old replay of him vs seohyeon, he immediately realizes hyeon uses the same unique hotkey setup (from brood war) as "asgchobo" in the master cup games, and makes this near conclusive post.
Day 4 - Rossi contacts hyeon on battle.net to get a confession and 100% undeniable proof that hyeon has played for chobo
Day 4 - Chobo makes his confession
Day 4 - Hyeon makes his confession

The undeniable evidence

Obtained by Rossi on the Korean server.

+ [In Chat Form] +

+ [In Image form] +

Statement from AsGChoBo and Seohyeon

Seohyeon's statement. (Link)

+ Show +

Chobos confession (link)

+ Show +

Aftermath

There was huge tension between people who wanted a fair trial and his accusers who were too hasty in their judgments. PiG makes an excellent post summing it here up where he notes accusers raged/bullied/abused the neutral guys who were just trying to be 100% thorough. This attitude has popped up several times on sc2sea and is very worrying, there were people PMing iaguz and thanking him for speaking out as they were afraid to post because of the backlash they saw for the people who did.

Its important to note ultimately the hacking accusations were dead wrong, Chobo was not hacking but it was a Korean pro playing on the account and if not for them, chobo would have been condemned a hacker forever and the real truth would never have been found. Imagine how dangerous that would have been? I also hope people hold no blame to any clan or team after this on both sides of the fence, as you can see everyone wanted the same thing in the end - for the cheater to be caught and for justice to be done. AsG is a fantastic clan who of course were deceived by chobo, just like everyone else here was. In the end, it was fabulous to see the whole community working together in unison to catch him.

I also feel that certain key people should be awarded for their efforts in this case with a custom achievement. These would be posters such as Rossi, tgun, Mafia, iaguz, UHF among others. All of whom spent a lot of time and effort that ultimately brought chobo to justice. TheGentleman, I am looking at you for this logo

And as Maynarde said +1 to SC2SEA

Punishment

Obviously we can't cart people off to jail but we take these matters extremely serious and we will do what we can to show that. The following decision was decided as a whole by our SEAL group of admins, which also includes close to all the mods on the site.

It goes without saying chobo will not receive any of the Master Cup prize winnings and he has been immediately removed from his coaching position on the site.
Their case will be made known to starcraft communities around the world, publicly shaming them. Their team managers will/have being informed as will the admins of major tournaments. This is the biggest punishment in my opinion, and something both players will never be able to recover fully from. This is probably enough to effectively end their playing career, which in SeoHyeun' case might seem really harsh if he was indeed fully aware of what he was doing.
The both of them will be banned from all online tournaments in SEA up for a period of 1 year for the deception and smurfing caused.
Dox highlights a good concept in a post: "I reckon with all maphackers/smurfs/cheaters of any capacity, banning them from online tournaments is more than sufficient. I'd never ban them from a LAN event where they can irrefutably prove their skills." I agree with this idea, but only after a minimum time frame and I guess the LAN organisers will decide that themselves if the situation pops up.

The last few days have been hectic as hell, thank you to the detectives mainly Rossi who solved the case and the many others who spent countless hours analyzing replays. Also to tgun, UHF, nemo and others and the AsG team who fought for a fair trial which lead to uncovering the real truth. I'm glad all this is finally over. Case closed!

Quick Comments

	SungInSPR:
	Peleus:	Satisfied with the punishment, thanks to all the work from everyone
	FvRphoneheha:
	TheGentleman:	This is fair and reasonable imho. +1 to SC2SEA
	Synizta:
	Nemo:	Don't forget iaguz and you for the achievment !
	Xenomorph:
	Maynarde:
	Baldie:
	Champi:
	Pox:
	Sent1nel:	Chobo will be banned from all Online and LAN events I have any involvement with for at least 1 year.
	FvRelimzkE:	Suitable punishment. Hope to see you in a year Chobo, get good yourself this time ;)
	DM.MCZ.Polaris:
	Reere: