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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.""
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.
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.
Can we still speak of Virtual Theft for a matter of $400 ? That sounds like proper theft to me.
Such rough justice could only happen in a virtual environment, of course. Or Texas.
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
I think he said he made over $20,000 over the corse of one year selling virtual items.
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.
This wasn't always the case. EA has slowly farmed more and more support out to India over the years in an effort to reduce costs.
Why? Because the support department is under the auspices of EA.com which contains little else other than customer support and the idiotic $150 million purchase called Pogo.com. Since all the online games are released under EA Games and the wholly EA owned studios that produced them all profits go into EA Games and then trickles to the studios. The only way EA.com "makes a profit" (theoretically since it never has) is to bill the individual studios for customer support time. And in the age old tradition of shafting employees and attempting to maximize profits they charge upwards of $40/hour for a US customer support rep to support a studio's game (while paying that rep around $10/hour or $3-$4 less than even a Dell phone tech). The Indian support team is even cheaper which is why more and more work has been farmed out to them (you will also find this at Dell if you call during off peak hours). Thus while EA as a whole posts record profits on record revenue, EA.com and the support team keeps getting whittled away.
And you are actually wrong about the Indian guys not playing. They do play, but the their level of knowledge is not high and the language barrier is a big problem. After months of assisting custoemr they usually get as good as a newbie US support member, but at that point they are usually "transfered to another team" or some such and a new batch of clueless, language impaired newbs is forced on the US support staff.
Knowing the name of the internal DB gets you very little, and I doubt the main article's story got all its facts right (unless the Japanese support team has begun ignoring the rules again) as very few support personnele have access to the passwords themselves. Billing verification must also be made first.
Catbert is little more than a basic stats/usage and notation device. Most data stored in it relates to actions that have been taken against an account by the support service for violations and whatnot. If he was instructing you to have them "fix your account in catbert" it probably means that you were penalty boxed (either for bad behaviour of by accident) and a GM needed to remove the PB (if accident) and note your account as to why the PB was removed.
Don't knock the US half of the support team (though you probably get to see less and less of them) as they are a dedicated bunch of wonderful people working their guts out trying to do the right thing.
If you want to blame someone, go after the soul crushing company that is grinding them into dust. Rumor has it EA is ready to lay off most of EA.com to "improve profits" and shift the support team from Austin to LA (where they just crushed and relocated what's left of Westwood to).
You think MS is evil? Try talking to an EA exec for 20 minutes. See if you can resist punching them in the mouth.