Every year, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) asks rightsholders to nominate the foreign piracy sites and services they see as the biggest threats.
The resulting list of ‘notorious markets‘ traditionally features torrent sites, cyberlockers and streaming portals. In recent years, hosting companies and other intermediaries were added as well.
Last week, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), which represents many of the major video game companies, submitted its latest recommendations. These include the usual suspects, but also a target that doesn’t have a website of its own.
A Game Cracker as a Piracy ‘Market’
ESA’s submission lists ‘voices38’ as one of its new threats. The game industry group describes the anonymous cracker as a persistent operation that specializes in beating Denuvo Anti-Tamper, the popular technical protection measure that’s used by at least nine of its members.
According to ESA, Reddit’s r/CrackWatch index attributes roughly two dozen cracked or bypassed games to ‘voices38’. The gaming group stresses that the cracker plays a key role in the piracy ecosystem as its releases are picked up by repackers, torrent sites, cyberlockers and piracy forums.
“Each crack therefore unlocks an entire downstream market for an unauthorized copy of that title. For a title that no other actor has made usable, but for Voices38’s crack there would be no functioning pirated copy for those markets to offer,” the submission notes.
“Treating only those downstream services as markets would overlook the upstream operation that determines whether protected games can be offered by them at all.”
The fact that the cracker has no public identity or “traditional homepage” shouldn’t stand in the way of a Notorious Markets listing either, ESA notes. In fact, it argues that a listing could help rightsholders crack down on the cracking operation.
“Designation would focus attention on identifying the operator, preserving evidence, disrupting distribution accounts and donation channels, and coordinating action across the forums, repositories, hosting services, peer-to-peer infrastructure, and other intermediaries used to seed each release,” ESA writes.
Ideally, ESA would like to identify the person or people behind the popular cracker handle and it’s not alone in this. Identifying the operator is also what Denuvo is trying to do through a U.S. federal court.
Lawsuit Doesn’t Stop the Cracks
Last month, Denuvo sued ‘voices38’ at a California federal court and it recently asked for permission to subpoena Discord, Valve and Reddit. ESA’s submission doesn’t mention this lawsuit.
So far, this hasn’t stopped the cracks from coming out. After a few quiet weeks, ‘voices38’ released cracks for Atomfall and The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales last week, as well as a crackfix for Dead Space Remake.
These releases swiftly spread over torrent sites and cyberlockers. Popular repacker FitGirl has already picked them up too, which brings us to ESA’s next target.
Billion Dollar FitGirl
After already being included in USTR’s 2024 and 2025 notorious markets lists, FitGirl gets a recommendation from ESA for the next installment.
FitGirl’s site is currently blocked in Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere, but ESA notes that these measures didn’t change much. The repack site received 41.77 million visits in August and continues to offer games published by ESA members.
“FitGirl’s scale and persistence demonstrate that prior blocking and designation have not induced meaningful remediation by its operator. ESA’s takedown notices to the site are ignored, with zero links removed between August 2025 and August 2026,” ESA writes.
The game companies also put a billion-dollar price tag on the losses, which they report down to the last cent.
“Between March and August 2026 alone, ESA detected 15,484,145 users in peer-to-peer swarms for games repacked by FitGirl, with an estimated lost value of $1,083,735,308.55,” the submission notes.
A footnote explains that this figure is based on a retail price of $69.99 for every user ESA spotted in a swarm.
Other targets are not very responsive either. DODI-Repacks removed 22% of the reported links and RuTracker, the Russian torrent site, complied with just 3% of ESA’s notices over the past year.
While these sites are not responding, ESA highlights that tracking their finances, including crypto transactions that go to KYC-vetted platforms such as Binance, could help to identify these targets.
Handheld Consoles as ‘Superfakes’
This year, the USTR’s review has a special focus on high-quality counterfeit goods, known as superfakes. ESA uses this opportunity to highlight handheld consoles that come preloaded with pirated games, which it sees as the video game equivalent of superfakes.
The group nominates Anbernic.com, the official store for a widely sold line of handheld emulation devices. ESA says these are routinely offered or shipped with memory cards that hold hundreds or thousands of unauthorized games, and notes that they are sold through Amazon and eBay as well.
The submission further lists G2A, FunPay and Eldorado.gg, where game accounts and in-game items are traded, as well as cheat sellers including Cronus Zen. ESA argues that cheats belong on a piracy list because they circumvent the technological protection measures of games.
It’s now up to the USTR to decide which of these recommendations make the final list. The previous edition was published in March, so we might have to wait a while before the final Notorious Markets list arrives.
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A copy of ESA’s submission for the 2026 Notorious Markets review is available here (pdf).
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