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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!
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.
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"
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.