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Sep.06 2010, 02:04:47
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12 REGISTERED USERS 3 AUCTIONS
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Virtual Worlds & Theft News: Amazing but True
This article was published in New Scientist in 2005. Just goes to show the power of e-currency that is only usable in a virtual game world.
"A chinese exchange student has been arrested in Japan on suspicion of carrying out a mugging spree within the virtual gameworld Lineage 2.
The young man utilised bot characters – artificial intelligence controlled characters – to mass attack player characters within the world, and strip them of all valuable objects, which were immediately sold for their substantial cash value. Because the assailants were bots, they were equipped with superhuman reflexes, making them essentially unbeatable.
How many such muggings were actually carried out is unclear, but with a single rare item potentially fetching £400 or more ($800us), the potential for him to have made a fortune rises very quickly.
The items were fenced through a Japanese auction website, according to NCsoft, the company behind Lineage 2.
By performing tasks within the world at high speed, repetitively for hours on end, a bot can easily far exceed any human player in proficiency at a given skill. This unfair advantage can then be used by a player with a moral vacuum to prey on the weaker human minds.
Bruce Schneier, a renowned computer security expert, stated that the distinction between physical and virtual crime is rapidly disappearing. He points to recent reports of crooks trying to hack into gameworlds or steal players account information to make cash.
"I regularly say that every form of theft and fraud in the real world will eventually be duplicated in cyberspace," Schneier wrote on his weblog. "Perhaps every method of stealing real money will eventually be used to steal imaginary money, too."
There are also reports that some online scammers are using “sweatshops” in countries such as China and Indonesia in which people monitor teams of bots in order to generate money whilst avoiding bot traps."
See the full Story at: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7865
Also along these lines, Site Administrator for Virtual Worlds reports on a 2006 story out of Japan.
"Problems cropping up from the trade of virtual items in collaborative virtual worlds have been increasing steadilly.
In Japan, the trade of assets within the virtual world for actual money, which has been dubbed real money trading (RMT), is believed to have become a 15 billion yen industry.
Online gaming is now an 82 billion yen market, an increase of about 140 percent compared with last year.
Since there are no regulations or specific rules for RMT, more problems are expected.
RMT has increased in recent years in line with the growing popularity of online gaming.
The trend has created some professional traders who mediate game players. A Tokyo trader said items or weapons difficult to obtain can be priced at 50,000 yen to 100,000 yen, or occasionally even 2 million yen.
In late August, a high school student in Kyoto told Kyoto prefectural police that he sent 150,000 yen to an account in exchange for a game weapon, but he never received the virtual item.
Three similar complaints were lodged at the Osaka municipal consumers' center this year.
In Tokyo and Yokohama, local consumer centers received a number of complaints between May and June from buyers who were unable to contact the sellers after paying.
In South Korea, where RMT is believed to have created a 1 trillion won (120 billion yen) business, fraudulent acts and assault cases in relation to RMT have already become a major problem. The South Korean Fair Trade Commission has ordered game developers to set a ban on RMT among individual users." |
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