Paxful has since strengthened its compliance standards and improved its anti-money-laundering technology. Everyone’s winning-except, as we now know, Microsoft.” A Paxful spokesperson says Kvashuk was a “bad actor” and that the company cooperated with prosecutors. “If I’m getting 50% off, they’re getting 25% off. “A ton of my friends on the school bus played Xbox, so I would buy these codes from this dealer on Paxful at a steep discount, and then resell them to my friends, still at a great discount,” explains Avsterbone, aka Avi Rachlin, who is now 19 and studying business at Penn State University. When I contact a trader by the handle Avsterbone, who unwittingly purchased a few of Kvashuk’s stolen Xbox codes, it turns out he was a high school student at the time, not a MacBook mafioso.
It seems probable that this financing was part of some criminal operation-“Wait a moment, I contact the boss,” Makoo said at one point-but at least some of Kvashuk’s buyers were merely trying to get a deal on video game currency.
