Livestreaming a tank of fish playing video games seems like a harmless, fun idea. That is, until the fish find their way into the settings menu. The Mutekimaru YouTube channel learned this the hard way when the fish it features committed credit card fraud.
The channel features a livestream of a fish tank with a grid of controller inputs on the bottom. A webcam looking down from the top of the tank connects to a PC running software that tracks the movements of the fish across the grid. The software sends this data to a Nintendo Switch that commits the controller actions into a game, like Pokemon. So the fish are playing, even though they don’t know it.
Everything was going smoothly until a game crashed while the fish were playing unmonitored by humans. Instead, the fish had free reign over the entire system when it rebooted, and they eventually found their way into the settings, where credit card information had been stored. They ended up adding 500 yen to the system’s eShop account, which fortunately isn’t much, about $3.80 U.S. But it could have been a lot worse.
