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During a live stream, pet fish spent money and revealed their owner’s credit card information to thousands of people.
The unusual occurrence occurred during an unusual experiment conducted by a Japanese YouTuber who wanted to see if his fish could complete a video game on their own.
Mutekimaru set up his fish to play the latest Pokemon game on Nintendo Switch by using a webcam pointed at their fishbowl and motion-tracking software to monitor their movements and translate them into button inputs.
Footage shows them swimming across a grid mapped onto their bowl, each square labelled with a Switch controller command.
They had been playing for over 1,100 hours when the game crashed, which is perhaps unsurprising given that the latest Pokemon games have been criticised for being prone to bugs.
The fish had previously completed a previous game in the series in under 3,000 hours.
When it happened, Mutekimaru was away from his streaming setup, and the Switch continued to accept button commands from the fish.
They eventually found their way to the console’s store.
The fish then used the credit card stored on Mutekimaru’s Switch to add 500 yen (£3.10) to his account, exposing the card details to everyone watching. The fish also triggered a store download, had PayPal send their owner a confirmation email, and changed the name of their account.
Nintendo appeared to be sympathetic to the situation, as Mutekimaru stated that the company granted a refund. Source