20,000 Bots, Tens of Thousands in Payouts — Epic Sues Fortnite Creators Over Massive Botting Scheme

Epic Games has filed a lawsuit accusing two Fortnite Creative developers of using more than 20,000 bots to fake engagement on their islands and collect payouts from Epic’s creator program.

1. Lawsuit overview
2. How the scheme worked
3. Payments and impact
4. Legal aims and next steps
5. Context and related actions

Lawsuit overview

Epic’s complaint names two men, Idris Nahdi and Ayob Nasser, as defendants. According to the filing, they created multiple fake accounts and used more than 20,000 bots to inflate the apparent popularity of their Fortnite Creative islands. Epic says it stopped payments after detecting the activity and that real engagement on those islands was largely manufactured.

In the suit, Epic says the fake engagement made up between 88% and 99% of interactions on the affected islands. The company now seeks to recover the money it paid under those false pretenses and to protect its creator program from similar schemes.

How the scheme worked

Epic’s filing describes a setup where the defendants uploaded multiple islands across developer accounts to spread fake engagement. Then, according to the complaint, they used a cloud gaming service to run the bot accounts.

Specifically, the filing quotes: “Defendants programmed the bot accounts to engage with Defendants’ own Fortnite Islands by using a cloud gaming service that allows users to play video games, like Fortnite, remotely,” and says the bots were used to simulate play sessions and other metrics that factor into payouts.

Botting is a widespread problem online; for example, Twitch has taken action against viewbots recently, and some researchers estimate much internet traffic is driven by automated accounts. For more on the Twitch actions, see this report from Forbes. Also, by some estimates, a large share of internet traffic can be bots rather than humans.

Payments and impact

Epic calculates creator payouts using a mix of metrics, including session length, downstream purchases in the Fortnite shop, and the number of participants on an island. Because those numbers feed Epic’s Engagement Program payouts, the company says false engagement directly affected how much real creators received.

The filing alleges the defendants made “tens of thousands of dollars” through the scheme. In response, Epic stopped payments to the implicated accounts and reported a drop in concurrents for the affected islands once the bot activity ceased.

The complaint stresses the broader effect: “Developers trust that the time spent creating Islands will be rewarded in accordance with the Engagement Program Payout Terms, and based on how real players engage with the Islands.” It adds that the alleged fraud “undermines Epic’s relationship with developers, however, depriving legitimate developers of the full share of funds they otherwise would have received and eroding the trust Epic has built with them.”

Legal aims and next steps

Epic’s requested remedies include recovering the funds it paid as a result of the fake engagement. The company also asks the court to bar both defendants from creating future accounts and even from downloading or playing Fortnite.

Notably, the filing asks that those prohibitions apply to the defendants’ “heirs [and] successors,” language that Epic includes in its requested relief. Before the lawsuit, Epic says it told the accused to “destroy all copies of Fortnite in their possession,” but the company claims they did not comply, which helped prompt legal action.

Context and related actions

Epic has a history of legal action against cheating and fraud. For example, the company has previously sued cheat makers and sellers, and during the summer it forced two tournament cheaters it had banned to publicly apologize. In this case, Epic frames the suit as both a financial recovery effort and a defense of trust in its creator ecosystem.