Codemasters Loses 3 Million Dirt 3 Keys
Don’t you hate when you misplace something? You know, the TV remote, your cell phone, 3 million Dirt 3 keys. What’s that, you haven’t misplaced 3 million Dirt 3 keys? My bad, that was Codemasters. I wouldn’t say that they misplaced them, so much as they left them out for anyone to take.
Here’s what happened. Codemasters has been running a deal with AMD to give out free copies of the game to people who purchase a new graphics card. That’s not an uncommon thing to see these days, as AMD and Nvida are always trying to get an edge on each other. The strange part of the tale is that the company left all 3 million codes sitting on a webserver for anyone to see. Seriously, you could just type in the right address, and you would see the codes sitting there in all their glory.
At this point, you might be excited at the prospect of scoring a free code, and maybe a few for your buddies. That’s exactly what you don’t want to do. In fact, if you’ve had a generous friend bestow a key upon you, don’t activate it. If you have activated it, you’re probably going to want to get in touch with Valve and let them know what happened (as all of the keys were for Steam).
While it’s possible that no harm will come to your Steam account, it is entirely possible that if you’re caught using a stolen key, Valve could take action. While it’s more likely that they will simply remove the game from your library, I know I wouldn’t want to risk losing access to all of my games.
