Can you make a fortune by hacking a video game?

For a long time, the world of hacking video games was shrouded in secrecy. Until security researcher, Adrian, lifted the lid on his methods.

Adrian is a Polish immigrant who grew up in the US, but in the hacking community he’s better known by his pseudonym 'Manfred'.

As Manfred, he’s spent over 20 years diving into the coding of video games to exploit their weaknesses and sell the plunder.

Manfred first realised how lucrative the world of online game purchases was when he sold a virtual property on the 1997 game Ultima Online.

In the online game, houses were highly sought-after objects and Manfred had a castle. He put the virtual property on eBay expecting it to make, at best, a few hundred dollars. It sold for $2,800.

Manfred was shocked at first, but then saw the potential for making lots of money.

“Most people don’t want to grind away in the game,” he explains. “They don’t want to spend eight hours a day mining virtual rocks, they’d rather just pay somebody else to do it.”

While Manfred could make money by spending hours working to generate valuable digital objects, he wanted to speed things up. By hacking into a video game’s code, he could manipulate the game to give him profitable items at the touch of a button.

Many of Manfred’s hacking methods involved tricking the game into providing users with more items than it has been programmed to allow.

Another clever trick he used worked a bit like an odometer in a car that measures miles. When an odometer gets to its top value, for example 9999, the next value will reset the odometer to its 0000 position.

In a 32-bit computer, the numbers are higher with values going up to 4.2 billion, but the same principle applies. It’s called integer overflow or underflow.

By subtracting one from