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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.""
Then he could virtually, uh, "drop the soap".
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
'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
So they're arresting a guy who sold a house that didn't exist, to a buyer who was willing to pay for it anyway, for a big wad of cash, and all in a day's work.
Dude, don't lock him up! I want him to be my real estate agent.
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!
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* >)
---
"An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" - Gandhi
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.
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.