Muhammad Zakir Khan, an assistant professor of speech communication at Florida's Broward College, wanted to play the multiplayer online video game "Paragon." But when he tried to create an account on Sunday, a message popped up on his screen saying he had been blocked.
The problem? He was told he couldn't create an account "as a result of a match against the Specially Designated Nationals List maintained by the United States of America's Office of Foreign Assets Control."
"I was thinking, 'Am I getting hacked right now? Is this some really cruel joke?" Khan, who was born in the U.S., told NBC News.
He wasn't actually on the list; someone else with the same name from Pakistan was on it. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, it's designed to block "terrorists and narcotics traffickers" from doing business with people in the United States.
In a series of tweets, Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, the company that makes "Paragon," apologized and explained that Khan was blocked due to "bad filtering code" required by "U.S. trade restrictions."
He wrote that Epic Games originally used the code for "paid commercial access" to its "Unreal Engine 4" game engine, and then simply reused it for "Paragon." The code will be reworked, he said, to not block people based solely on their name.
Incidents like this "happen fairly often," according to Shirin Sinnar, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School. That is because the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list has nearly 6,000 names on it, she told NBC News, many of them "extremely common Latino and Muslim names."
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