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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.
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!
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
People buy online items for real money on occasion.
This man fraudently obtained the online item but getting the password and then sold it for real money.
so he's guilty of fraud for a start.
Easy.
He gained access to something he didn't have a right to access, by stealing the password. He then sold - or at least got money for -something he didn't own. The fact that the property is virtual is besides the point; obviously someone didn't want it stolen, and some one else was villing to shell out hard cash for it
There is one word for such things; Fraud
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
for us brits.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
The crime is due to the fact that there is no difference between someone stealing the "real" bits in your bank account that represent the time you spent flipping burgers (or writing code or whatever) and stealing the "virtual" bits in your Ultima Online account that represent the time you spent amassing game items.
If someone obtains your password by illegitimate means and empties your account of bits, how could it be a crime with one type of account and not with another? After all, you spent time amassing the bits in either type of account.
When time from people's lives is stolen, it's so often expressed in terms of the unit of measurement that we call money that it's easy to forget that the value of what was stolen is due to someone's investment of time. Everything you own is the result of an investment of time.
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
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?
I think he said he made over $20,000 over the corse of one year selling virtual items.
*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?
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.
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).