A cross-Taiwan Strait video game piracy ring, the largest of its kind in history, was broken recently, the Intellectual Property Rights Police Team (IPRPT) reported Thursday. Officers of the IPRPT under the National Police Agency raided a warehouse in Sanchong City, Taipei County Sept. 27, arresting four suspects and thousands of pirated copies of video game discs. The games, totaling 140,000 discs for PS2, Wii and X-Box, had a total street value of some NT$260 million (US$8.39 million), the IPR police said. 'Nearly all of the pirated disc inventory in Taiwan was busted in that operation,' said an IPRPT official. 'There must be a shortage on the market now, ' he said. According to the IPRPT, the four suspects, surnamed Chou, Wang, Wu and Liu, had shuttled between Taipei and China's Guangzhou, where the factory forging the discs is located, took delivery of shipments at the airport, or played the part of customers by placing orders with stores for games, which the ring itself would then supply, to make transaction records appear legitimate. It took the IPR police nearly seven months to trace the ring after game developers or game owners tipped them off about the counterfeits. However, the police said that the only way to root out piracy once and for all is to eradicate the source -- the factories in China. 