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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.""
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.
Maybe they should virtually arrest him and give him a virtual fine or virtual jail!
I think the fact that real money was involved at some point (how much is ¥50k anyway?) is what's got the authorities involved. There was loads of this sort of thing with Diablo II I believe (not really an expert on these MMORPGs though, don't think real money got stolen, although there were a few auto-generated (i.e. fake - an interesting concept in a virtual world) items being sold, wern't there?).
It seems as though this will be a new trend in/type of crime. I will be interested to see what the outcome of this one is, and let's not forget the poor sod who paid real money for this house, and got sold up the river. "I paid 50k Yen for this virtual house, and all I got was this lousy Tee-shirt!" *hehehehe* >)
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"An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" - Gandhi
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.
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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.
Oh yeah, that's some 31337 h@X0r1ng right there. Well, if nothing else, it once again proves that social engineering is most effective cracking tool.
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.
..where is the crime?
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.
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).
Anybody that's purchasing a virtual house with real money must have a little too much time and money on their hands
So its OK to defraud someone, as long as the're rich?
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 real lawsuit, because the victim was swindled out of real money in the real world. You could argue that selling some one a company which doesn't really exist is a "virtual crime", but not many people would agree with you. Personally, I have little sympathy for the victim, but she's still a victim.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
If he had gotten a job instead of playing EQ, how much money would he have earned?
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).
People who get all excited about virtual events in virtual reality online games should be sent for reeducation to an African village where real people are starving to real death, and the cost of a virtual house would feed everyone for a month.
What a fucking waste of evolution.
I've heard that done in Everquest. Apparently if you annoy the GMs enough they can dump you into a padded cell for a week, where you get to sit and contemplate your crimes. Don't know if the week is measured in real world time, or whether you have to actually be logged in for a week.