From an ArsTechnica article on Evony:

A commentator on a blog post about how Evony could potentially be malware revealed that he was a game design student and had reverse-engineered the client because he was curious about the game’s prolific bandwidth use.

According to the user, Lee, “included with the client are 2 pieces of tracking software that monitor your web use and which applications you have open while the client is running. These do not install independently on the machine though due to the limitations of flash and do not actually damage anything. But they harvest massive volumes of information… however there is a LOT of data coming IN over the ports the client uses. In otherwords [sic] it is downloading something into my cache for use later.”

[…]

Determining who actually owns Evony is easier said than done, since a virtual maze of corporations surrounds the game. Aside from UMGE and Evony LLC, the game is also associated with a corporation called Regan Mercantile US, LLC. This company is registered out of the Marshall Islands, which means that neither shareholders nor company directors are on public files, the companies are exempt from taxation, and there isn’t a requirement to file accounts or annual returns.

Regan Mercantile is listed in the Evony Terms of Use Agreement as the company that currently owns the game. According to the company’s registration paperwork, its director is a woman named Lu Lu who lists her address in China. Lu Lu is reportedly dating David Guo, who seems to be the ultimate mastermind behind Evony. Comments on different news stories have listed Guo as the founder of the game and its associated companies. Guo is a noted computer hacker who was involved with the 1999 “war without smoke” between Taiwan and China.

Unfortunately, getting information on the inner workings of Evony and the people that run it is becoming more and more difficult. Recently, a former manager for the company revealed —on Everiss’s blog— how his ex-employer is using Chinese police to commit strong-arm intimidation tactics to keep people from speaking out about Evony.

Chinese ex-hacker makes a fake game which spies on its user; we don’t know which corporation actually owns the game or who its employees really are; that corporation has control over the police; Sounds like a freaking William Gibson/Neal Stephenson novel.