Pet fish have spent money and revealed their owner’s credit card details to thousands of people during a live stream.
The unlikely incident happened during an unusual experiment by a Japanese YouTuber, who wanted to see if his fish could complete a video game by themselves.
Using a webcam pointed at their fishbowl and motion-tracking software to monitor their movements and translate them into button inputs, Mutekimaru set up his fish to play the latest Pokemon title on Nintendo Switch.
Image: The fish operated the Nintendo Switch by swimming across a grid marked with buttons. Pic: Mutekimaru Channel/YouTube
Footage shows them swimming across a grid mapped on to their bowl, with each square labelled with a command on the Switch’s controller.
The fish had managed to complete a previous game in the series – and it only took north of 3,000 hours.
On this occasion, they had been playing for more than 1,100 hours when the game crashed, which is perhaps not a surprise, given the latest Pokemon games have been criticised for being prone to bugs.
Mutekimaru was away from his streaming setup when it happened – and the Switch continued to accept button commands from the fish.
Eventually, they managed to navigate to the console’s store.
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From there, the fish managed to add 500 yen (£3.10) to Mutekimaru’s account using the credit card that was stored on his Switch – and expose the card details to everyone watching.
The fish also triggered a download from the store, had PayPal send their owner a confirmation email and changed their account name.
Nintendo seemed to take a sympathetic view of the situation, as Mutekimaru said the company granted a refund.
Sky News has contacted Nintendo for comment.