united-states hacking
Is it legal to cheat in single player games with no in-app purchases?
<p>I had a single player free-to-play (gratis, but not libre) game on my phone a couple years ago. It has no in-app purchases; AFAICT it's completely funded by ads. One feature of it is that you can get free &quot;coins&quot; every hour. One time I decided to run a packet sniffer on my phone's network traffic just out of curiosity, and saw that every time I open that game, it makes an unencrypted HTTP request to the developer's server, and the server sends back the UNIX time. I set up a fake server on my LAN that increments by one hour every time it is requested, regardless of how much time actually passes, and used a custom DNS server to make the app's requests go to my spoofed server. After I did this, the app let me get free coins whenever I wanted. Was this legal? I didn't modify the app code or hack the developer's server; I just reverse engineered the app's communication with the server and set up a spoofed server on my LAN.</p>

<p>They could take you to court for loss of income - since you were gaining coins for free instead of paying for them (essentially theft)</p>
<p>In the UK it actually falls under Theft as you dishonestly appropriated goods which did not rightfully belong.</p>
<p>Would someone chase you up on this... probably not. I'd say you're safe.</p>
