5000 Fake Live Accounts Commissioned By Design Firm

The Xbox Live star rating system is an important way of securing publicity for Indie Games, but recently, a mysterious flurry of negative votes has caused deserving titles to fall off of the limelight in favour of other more cynical offerings. The ever-observant Robert Boyd, founder and driving force behind Zeboyd Games, has discovered that an online design firm may have commissioned the creation of 5000 free Xbox Live user accounts to be used with a spambot - almost certainly with the objective of manipulating the ratings system for their clients.

A user claiming to be Limitless Exposure LLC has commissioned freelance coders to create the accounts on ScriptLance - explicitly stating that they didn't need to be linked to valid email addresses. With 5000 accounts at their disposal, causing games to rise up through (and slip down through) the limelight will be child's play.

We've reached out to Limitless Exposure for comment, and we'll keep you updated. It's possible that a malicious user is impersonating the firm or that this move is designed to test some sort of online functionality for a client, but it's looking very suspicious indeed.