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Japanese Man Arrested For Virtual Theft
Kethinov writes "The Daily Yomiuri is reporting that a 21-year-old man was arrested for "illegally accessing an Internet game server to sell a virtual 'house' owned by a woman to another game participant for 50,000 yen, police said Thursday. According to the MPD, Ryusei Sakano of Itabashi Ward, Tokyo, posed as a female game player he met online while playing 'Ultima Online,' a popular Internet-based game. Sakano reportedly asked the game's system administrator to provide the female player's entry password on the pretext that she had lost her password to the game.""
Maybe they should virtually arrest him and give him a virtual fine or virtual jail!
'Ultima Online' hacker arrested over 'house' sale
Yomiuri Shimbun
The Metropolitan Police Department has arrested a 21-year-old man on suspicion of illegally accessing an Internet game server to sell a virtual "house" owned by a woman to another game participant for 50,000 yen, police said Thursday.
According to the MPD, Ryusei Sakano of Itabashi Ward, Tokyo, posed as a female game player he met online while playing "Ultima Online," a popular Internet-based game.
Sakano reportedly asked the game's system administrator to provide the female player's entry password on the pretext that she had lost her password to the game.
The police said Sakano then used the female player's password to illegally access the company's U.S. computer server for the game a total of seven times over a period of three months from September.
According to the MPD, Sakano took advantage of the fact that the game's virtual gold pieces--used by players as a virtual currency--can be traded through bulletin boards. He sold a virtual house belonging to the female player valued at 25 million gold pieces for 50,000 yen, the police said.
(just in case anyone was wondering)
-- Guges
At last people are taking this stuff seriously...
Now they just need to catch that guy who shows up here looking like me and screws up my karma.
- Back off man. I am a scientist
I knew the real estate market in Japan was pricey, but 50,000 yen for a "virtual" house???
Sounds like some frustrated Japanese are desperate become homeowners they're willing to settle for houses that don't even exist in the material world....
Never reset/give out passwords without 100% proof of identity. That said, this is really a non-news item, except maybe as a footnote in entertainment history. There has been trade of "virtual property" (which really isn't different from other types of data/accounts), and this is just really plain old fraud.
Actually, the article doesn't state what he's been charged with. The article is short on a lot of details, actually...
Sono koro, bokura wa, sore ga sekai no shinjitsu da to shinjite ita.
In Soviet Russia, virtual house sells you.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of virtual houses!!!
1. Steal virtual real-estate.
2. ???
3. Profit!
What would Natalie Portman do?
This is probably around $400 USD. (Actually a little bit more than that.)
- Anonymous Coward
Anyone who has followed/played UO over the years knows that all kind of fraud happens all the time. This case is notable because the guy both illegally accessed the account of another person by social engineering the password (this is clearly illegal in most countries), and surprisingly *got arrested* for his stunt. I could dig you numerous stories of people being frauded out of their virtual possessions thru old fashioned tricks or outright password stealing using trojans and social engineering emails designed to lure the victimg to disclose his account details.
In previous cases these incidents have usually been ignored by law enforcement, as it's understandably hard to explain how someone 'stole' stuff from you when it's all bits on some game server. So most cases are handled by EA/Origin customer support, and while sometimes the stuff is restored by the game admins, there are plenty of cases when the thief got away scot free since the situation was 'word against word' and EA/Origin decided not to interfere.
Looks like in this case the person losing the stuff went further than EA/Origin customer support and got law enforcement onto the case - and they actually responded and arrested the guy!
They can't let him get away with it. This is no different then posing as someone else on EBay or even making a commercial site that is very similiar to a real one (then you purchase a domain with a very smiliar name and wait for the typos). The problem is jurisdiction. If the hacker(criminal) wasn't Japanaese but American can the Japanese sue him? All online sites need to include in their EULA a clause saying that any illegal activity that takes place on their server can be tried in their country.
God made the natural numbers; all else is the work of man - Kronecker
This takes the cake for most non-newsworthy story of the month.
After virtual theft, can we expect to see virtual estate agents ("it's a real bargain, sir!"), virtual cops ("I'll track down your thief for a mere 10m gold pieces, ma'am!"), virtual lawyers ("my client was temporarily insane due to the pressure of game conformity, m'lod"), virtual punishments ("...and banished for life to MSN"), and virtual sex ("50m gold pieces and I'll tell you a nasty little secret..."). Can't wait.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
I always had the opinion that the only people with big houses full of lots of stuff in UO, were player killers, who hoarded all their stolen items from their killings.
In Soviet Russia, Ultima Online sells YOU!
Wait a sec, didn't it happen in the US too? OMG.
Get a life, people, or else STAY IN SOVIET RUSSIA like you deserve. Bwahaha
In the real world, the sysadmin should get a serious fine as well! I mean he is the key keeper of that very place.
If I loose the key to my appartment, my landlord will definitely want to see some ID and so to check if I am really the one I say I am - the tenant of that very appartment on the 15th floor. If he would give someone else the key to my appartment and my stuff would be stolen, this landlord would be in deep trouble.
When a computer user looses his password (key) the sysadmin (landlord) must make sure the claimer is truly the user (tenant) (s)he says (s)he is, before giving out the password.
Totally agree the one getting the password gets fined for this action.
The sysadmin however should also be punished for this.
Wouter.
I agree about fraud. Two counts. One for lying to get the password (unless that implies identity theft), one for selling something he doesn't own.
According to the MPD, Sakano took advantage of the fact that the game's virtual gold pieces--used by players as a virtual currency--can be traded through bulletin boards. He sold a virtual house belonging to the female player valued at 25 million gold pieces for 50,000 yen, the police said.
;)
are these gold pieces to yen what yen is to USDs?
moo
Why is it that the other player was necessarily called female player twice? We already knew she was a woman. A man would hardly have been repeatedly called "a male player". I could understand it if she was "a klingon player" or something. And, this happens all the time - as if women were a rare and unique species. I wouldn't call it sexism, really, just TMI.
There must be some huge houses in UO. Back when I played the game, a good three years back, I saw some large houses that were full packed to the walls with stuff. All hoarded by the owners. Usually gangs of Player Killers but sometimes genuine people too. UO was such a crazy game back in the day. All the bugs that let people get into your house etc.. quite humourous. Of course, the duping period was fun too.
.. UO must have some pretty major players who own *alot* of stuff if the world hasn't been wiped since I played. If people have stuck around since then, they must own lots.
Anyone remember Skunk Works?
The point is
I can see the appeal of selling a good character, its like allowing someone to win the UO lottery.. for a price, they get to enjoy all the rewards they may not have been able to get.
There's an argument in several models of jurisprudence (notably realism and Dworkinism) that fraud, when it causes economic loss, is no different from theft. Or, if its different at all, it is not a seperate crime but instead a sub-class of theft.
In this interpretation, the definition of theft becomes something like "The deprivation of a person's rightful and legal property through illicit means." With such a definition, its clear that there's some difference between knocking you down and robbing you, and stealing your Ultima password and selling your stuff, but both would be theft.
"Stumble before you crawl"
alg: Yeah bitch [slaps ass of RPN] you like that shit don't you.
RPN: MMmmmm, yeah baby!! Give it to me harder. Uhhhh, Uhhhh, UHHHHHHHH, YEAH GIVE IT TO ME BABY!!!
Certainly in EQ anyway, nice to see at least some enforcement agencies in the world are willing to consider doing something about it.
Theres currently a story running around that the officers of an EQ guild have been scamming all the guild funds/items and selling them on e-bay for thousands of dollars.
..where is the crime?
Even "better" punishment: Recite 1000 spam everyday for 5 years....
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
I bought this virtual house from him, and he never delivered it. He said it must have got lost in transit. Swine.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Japanese aren't the only ones paying large sums of money for UO houses and accounts.
We've been fighting it out all evening.
I've never played one of these games so I don't know how sophisticated they are but, aside from the actual fraud that has been (allegedly) committed, if the guy concerned had a UO account of his own, it would be interesting if his character could be placed in confinement (with guards) and not allowed to leave and resume normal activities for a period of time.
Political Correctness is doubleplusungood.
Scanning/faxing a copy of your ID is a really bothersome process if the person you're trying to verify the identity of has neither. It's not like you can just meet up by the apartment like in real life. If you have no valid contact info (wouldn't you normally have an e-mail address to send the pw to?), it's really hard to verify you're you. Maybe you have the CC data to verify with, but maybe you've outsourced that to a billing company and then you got pretty much nothing.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
All of the telephone support for UO is farmed out to some call center with inarticulate reps who don't actually play the game. I've called UO account support several times, and every single time wound up with someone who could barely speak English. These folks don't play UO, they don't have a clue how the game works, all they know is the scripts they've been given. They know how to enable an account, they sure know how to sell gametime codes, but if you mention "Pacific" or "Baja" (server names in UO) they have no idea what you're talking about.
Worse, one time the rep proactively gave me the name of their internal customer tracking database (it's called "Catbert," apparently). This was without prompting. I was having a problem logging in to a specific shard, but this guy didn't have enough access to fix the problem. So he told me to call a different number and "tell them to fix your record in Catbert."
Out of curiosity, I looked. Sure enough, catbert.owo.com is an actual host on their network. Lord only knows what kind of social engineering the word "Catbert" might allow one to get away with.
Point being, there will always be weak links like this when your support contract goes to the lowest bidder. I seriously doubt that it was the "system administrator" who gave out the female player's password. It was more likely some guy in Singapore making $2.50/day to answer phone calls.
(I haven't read the article)
Hmmm, now that raises an interesting question:
If he built the house with his own virtual hands...
Actually I can't phrase a coherent question right now, but you get the idea.
So much to do, so little bandwidth.
--
Try Mozilla
is the user, as usual. Funny, the sys admin gave the password - just posing as the woman. Wonder how better his social engineering skills were..
I just wanted to let you know that if I ever see you on the street, the exchange between alg and RPN is what you'll get, with me as RPN. You have a pretty mouth, hehe. BTW I'll be 25 on March 1st. Happy Birthday to me!!!
for us brits.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
That's all nice and well, but how much is 25 million gold in Zorkmids???
If this were to be criminal in South Korea I'm sure that a large portion of the Diablo 2 playing population would be jailed immediately. MMORPG'ers beware.
I think however you look at it, virtual cases like this shouldn't be dealt with as strictly as real-world 'equivalents'; even if they were dealing with real money. Anybody that's purchasing a virtual house with real money must have a little too much time and money on their hands. It seems to me that real lawsuits and cases should take precedent and perhaps be more strict, than virtual ones where the victims seem somewhat luxurious (this -is- a game afterall).
if he did this to his computer.
I'm curious to see what sort of fine/time this guy gets for his crime. Japan is notorious for its inconsistant sentences. One guy will get 3years for murdering his daughter while some guy (usually a foreigner) get's like ten years for trying to smuggle in 0.000001grams of marajiuana. So if this logic pervails, he should get 35 to life for this one.
My name is Tamaguci. I have recently been charged with overseeing the sale of several bridges located in Major US cities. For more information and to enter a bid online please go to
www.IcantBelieveThatsNotARealBridge.com
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Douglas Hofstadter made a point about this with A Person Paper on Purity in Language. It was published in his book Metamagical Themas (which is mainly an annotated collection of his columns for Scientific American).
Well I see I really fsck'd that up. I should stop now. But that's okay, I'm done working. No need to waste anymore time since I'm not getting paid anymore. The only reason I came back is for $$$$exyGal's Journal
/.
*booming superhero voice* We will meet again, RPN man(I assume man).
Serious question though, why do I need to use the proxy? In case of banning due to all the off-topics? I appreciate you looking out for me.
Peace out. Let's work on our issues and get together next week on
...getting arrested for trying to sell an item in a computer game?!
I'm sure Microsoft is not far behind, with the gambling debt I ran up in Vegas-mode solitaire. Will I get punished extra for resetting my score everytime I went into the red?
insignificant sig
"Sakano reportedly asked the game's system administrator to provide the female player's entry password on the pretext that she had lost her password to the game." (I had to say it) ...afterall, I thought information wanted to be FREE!
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
With such a definition, its clear that there's some difference between knocking you down and robbing you, and stealing your Ultima password and selling your stuff, but both would be theft.
Not really. The second example is still theft, but it is also theft and aggravated assault.
The woman apparently should have installed virtual security cameras to his house.
Then, one probably asks, why would anyone install security cameras to a virtual house?
After that, someone asks, why bother stealing someones virtual house, even if it was valuable?
And, finally, someone asks, why play such a game...
In Ultima Onlina, it is relatively easy to use macros to build up cash and experience. The guy could have spent the same amount of time building the house himself and selling it on ebay. Same profit, no risk.
Seriously, if you're paying *real* money to buy virtual stuff so you can impress your buddies with how l33t you are... Hand me that guy's CV and get him on the phone now!
This is a whole new economic model for me. Damn - I'm still working "Anyone want to buy this swamp land?" and it seems the world's passed me by. "Here's my Bryce-generated picture of the swamp land. Check out the castle up in the sky and the flying dolphins" - yeah, that'll work...
Sometimes stuff is restored? That must have been for the PK whiners or Origin employees.
I'd still be playing the game (and paying the $10.00 US/Mo if I'd gotten any help at all from customer support for my RP player.
I played from the beta test onward and everytime I called or e-mailed customer support for an in-game problem they blew me off.
So he used a social engineering attack to illegally enter a computer system, and manipulated the data therein for his own profit.
...
If this was in the US, they'dd be locking him up for 30 years as a hacker terrorist
Search E-Bay for "Ultima Online" or "Everquest" sometime. I've seen prices go well over $1,000 USD there for primo accounts. Bidding for 1 Million gold on Ultima Online usually starts at somewhere between $10 USD and $20 USD. We did a quick back of the napkin calculation of the worth of one virtual character based on that and decided that if he put his mind to it, he could probably sell his stuff for in the neighborhoold of $9,000 USD. I've heard of companies being formed to collect Everquest stuff for sale on E-Bay.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
...you were shot for paying $400 for a virtual house!
I think he said he made over $20,000 over the corse of one year selling virtual items.
How "virtual theft" so closely resembles regular old fraud.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
*RING*
Tech support guy: "EA Tech support. How can I help you?"
MAN: "Yes, I forgot my password."
TS: "Okay, what's your name?"
MAN: "Jane Doe."
Does anyone else see the problem with that?
I mean I don't agree with the guy selling virtual property that wasn't his... But $h*t... Now you can be thrown in jail for selling virtual stolen property? In a video game no less. Here's what I think should've happened, the game maker takes stand of not supporting sale of items in virtual world, so if you buy something and get screwed it's your fault. And the lady gets her house back, the guy who bought it and the guy that sold it to him get their accounts suspended. And finally the Sys Admin figures out a better way to authenticate password change/reset requests.
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It probably helped that the thief put some monetary value on the stolen property as he was selling it.
In my state, you can shoot my dog, you'll have a small fine for being cruel to an animal, and you'll have to pay me $10 for the depreciated value of the dog (assuming the dog is a mutt). But on the other hand, if you steal my dog and for some reason you sold it for $500, then that would constitute felony theft and there is a much better chance that the police and the court might be willing to get involved.
By that definition murder is the theft of someones life.
So it's a technically correct, but effectively stupid definition.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Women are too a rare and unique species. Just ask my wife.
-kgj
UO is a game. So's Superbowl, PGA tour, NBA basketball etc.
;) ).
People invest HOURS of their life playing games. If your business depends on them continuing to play, you definitely don't want to piss them off enough to play something else.
How about Money? You could say its not real too. Its value comes from enough people agreeing that it has value. If one day people believe the USD isn't worth anything, it isn't worth anything.
Most of what we do is actually meaningless in itself. It's when your life interacts with other people's lives that it starts to have meaning, that is if you believe life has value (think pyramid scheme
You play a silly game by yourself, you're the only one giving it value. You play that silly game with others, the others make it more real. If you make other people happy/entertained whilst playing with them, that makes it good.
You steal stuff from them, that makes it bad (unless it an agreed part of the game - includes the unwritten rules by game participants).
I used to scam very often in UO. Not quite in the same way, instead use of exploits and/or the social engineering of another player. Just a year or so agao, people were extremely easy to scam. A 10mil scam was exciting and yielded about $200US. Unfortunatly people don't seem as gullible now =[
For some reason there is just a feel of joy when you scam some 11 year old out of his gold that he just purchased from ebay with his mommies money... And then you sell it back to him!!
www.pk-hq.com
>There's an argument in several models of jurisprudence (notably realism and Dworkinism) that fraud, when it causes economic loss, is no different from theft.
:-)
I guess I'd counter that with a question: What types of fraud are there that don't cause some form of economic loss? And, if you have to grasp at straws to answer that, why even have the word at all if it's devoid of meaning?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
... arrested for Bank Robbery, more news at 5.
HA HA!
15kt == 1 Japanese city
He received financial compensation for something via dishonest means... fraud is fraud is fraud.
Thanks, you just put my kids through college!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Quit projecting your homophobia and self-loathing onto other people.
People have a right wear whatever clothes they want, act any way they want, and have a right to have a self-financed sex-change if they want (Even though we have no idea if Danamania had surgery).
It's their fucking body, and it has no impact on your life whatsoever, so leave her the fuck alone.
Do you want me to come over and tell you how you should treat your body, what clothes you should wear, and what to do with your hair?
If anything, danamania's webpage shows an intellegent, witty, and clever person. Why should you care about anything else, especially when your relationship with her is all virtual anyways.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
but I only have one machine, you insensitive clod! (I think that's all of them now...)
Well, there are plenty of words we have that are devoid of meaning, thanks to one linguistic event or another, but to answer your question...
I can defraud you, taking things that are solely of emotional value such as virginity.
There are other examples, but its late and I'm in a rush.
"Stumble before you crawl"
I work on occasion for .
We work on the users laptops and frequently they give us wrong passwords for us to dial in with them. And finding them an beating it out of them with a grue takes time.
So we just call up the helpdesk and ask for the password to be reset remotely.
It's never failed yet. But then we have never pulled the trick of getting a male to request a password for a woman.
This would be a non-issue if it took a week to sell property in these games.
Well, the issue of an idiot admin giving the password to the wrong person is very real as well, and should not be possible. The password should only be delivered via snail mail for purposes of privacy, or if some other signature/certificate system is used, via online methods, but there's no adequate way to prove identity over the phone. It's too easy to get other people's information.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Comparing software engineering to classical engineering assumes that software
has the ability to wear out. Software typically behaves, or it does not. It
either works, or it does not. Software generally does not degrade, abrade,
stretch, twist, or ablate. To treat it as a physical entity, therefore, is
misapplication of our engineering skills. Classical engineering deals with
the characteristics of hardware; software engineering should deal with the
characteristics of *software*, and not with hardware or management.
-- Dan Klein
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