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Student Makes a Million Online, Gets Deported
Via Kotaku, a story at the Mainichi daily news about an enterprising exchange student that got himself deported. Wang Yue Si, a Chinese student who went to Japan on a student visa, found himself in need of some spending money. Since he was a gamer, he decided to make some cash by selling virtual items online. He was so successful, the cops noticed. From the article: "He started selling items such as weapons and currency for online games through an Internet auction site in April this year, without obtaining the appropriate residency status. Wang, living in Kumamoto, has admitted that he sold the virtual goods for about 6 million yen ($US 1.3 Million), in violation of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law. A bank worker became suspicious when Wang regularly sent money back home to China and alerted police in August, prompting Kumamoto police officers to investigate the student."
Okay, deportation is a new angle, but there always seem to be problems when people sell in-game items. The stories keep coming...
I'd love to see a broad treatment of law-meets-games-meets-money from someone who actually understands the issues involved. I'm tangentially interested in all those things but I don't really have enough background to put these sorts of things into perspective.
Anyone?
do not fuck with gamers in Japan. They make the Koreans look like pussycats.
Four friends are playing a game of Monopoly. One guest turns to the other guest and offers to sell Park Place for $10 real dollars. You're the host, what would you do? That's right, tell the cheating bastard to go home.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Seeing how cutthroat the whole gold and itemfarming buisness is, to be able earn $1m+ from sales, he must have been the frontman of aa rather large gang of sweatshop farmers. Which would be perfectly fine as a violation of his status.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
They never cease to amaze me. I don't blame the opportunist quite as much as I blame the addicts.
Gambling, porn, online gaming... let's add drugs to the list too. It's all a waste of money. Porn is free as far as I'm concerned, gambling is often too risky the way some addicts play, and drugs waste in an obvious way. But paying for "virtual stuff" in a virtual world?! That's a waste of money and time.
It's not like I don't understand it -- I recall calling in sick to work more than once so I could finish a level of X-Wing versus Tie Fighter... the pay check started to reflect my obsession and I made corrections. I wish other people could learn that lesson.
I wouldn't exactly call him an idiot. With that cash he could go study anywhere he wants, forget Japan.
"Under US law, are you allowed to make money in your home country while studying?"
Depends...I run a little research area for my university and I hire students all the time.
Depending on their visa, they may only be able to do work that is solely in support of their education...as the research we do is academic in nature and its for the same university they are attending, they can do this. At the same time, some of the stuff I do for the university that is off-campus -- we do a lot of High School outreach and assessment -- I can't even ask that these folks come with me because they could be deported if someone wanted to get technical about it (i.e., same office, same sort of job, just benefiting another academic institution other than my own -- even if it is in a partnership where we both benefit).
So yeah, the US has the same sorts of laws. I think this is why most of the folks want to get more than an academic visa before coming over (though the academic one has a few privs that the working one doesn't...and vice a versa).
Well you can call him what you want, but the law is not exactly easy to understand (well when is it). When I was a student (on visa), I always wondered if it was legal to sell something on ebay, because technically if I made a profit on it, then it could be considered as work. Or what if you buy stock in the stock market and made money on it? There are lot of scenarios esp online where it is not very clear. Of course it is always better to err on the side of caution.
He made $1.3M selling NON-stuff.
How good of a salesman does it take to convince people to fork a million dollars over a period of a couple months, in exchange for a couple bits on a computer? Do you even have an idea of what that kind of talent is worth?
You're jealous.
You're bitter.
You wish you thought of it first.
You wish you had the balls and the skills required to pull it off.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
...How the HELL is he making all that money, and where can I get in on this?
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
Most of these laws are designed to prevent students / non-immigrants from stealing jobs from the locals and driving down wages. This guy wasn't messing with the local job market - he could have made the same money in any city in China. Would it have been any diferent if he had made money in the stock market?
I work for a bank. You'd be surprised at the level of monitoring these days. Particularly because employees are under instruction not to inform you of any suspicion they may have, for fear of alerting a potential criminal that his game is up.
Behold
You may not consider wikipedia 'credible', but a google search for "suspicious activity reporting" or "Anti money laundering guidelines brings up a wealth of credible documentation. I just linked to wikipedia because the information was presented in an easy to digest format.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Um, he WAS doing something suspicious. He was illegally making millions of dollars while ostensibly here (I live in Japan) studying. He's an ass. Also, you have to understand that in Japan a lot of the human and drug trafficking is done by Chinese Triads. If you are a bank worker here (probably the post office bank), and you have a 20something Chinese guy coming in every few weeks and sending tens of thousands of dollars to China, yeah, you're gonna be suspicious.
They are more Xenophobic than any other country I could imagine.
Well, especially if you're Chinese, although it's sort of a good idea to avoid even the appearance of wrongdoing if you're a resident alien in any country.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I got the drift....
:-* ". Later in the day a friend calls me and says he needs Vitamins while I sit on the Tram to a concert south in Praha - I give him the price and my bank account number and the code on my codelock at work - Free trade tends to be just that ... Free.
Selling Linux on CDRs while on vacation in Berlin, Germany - Poznan, Poland and Praha, Ceske Republica and mailing the CDRs to Norway and the minute after taking support calls from customers in Oslo, Norway and in the process making an awful more pocket money than the guy sitting next to me at the Internet Cafeteria. Then paying for a few used Nokia GSM phones in North Germany with PayPal and having them shipped to my girlfriend. She sells a few of them to pay for groceries and gives 1 of them to her daughter. She sends me an SMS that says "Thank You
It is time for planet earth to start walking the Libertarian road........
Most activities dont need regulation and cannot be regulated.
If you try to stop me I will just walk around you and continue my business while
I wonder why them boneheaded pinko Marxists never seem to learn.
I guess they will never learn.
As a foreign student living in Japan, I have to say you're overreacting way too much.
Overstaying your visa, working under the table (especially Americans teaching English), etc is very common over here. The police generally don't give a fuck (and can't), unless they want to make an example of you like for this Chinese guy. Channeling millions of yen out of the country, legally or not, is one of the things that WILL piss them off.
ps. Nice ad hominem there on the internets, good job. "Durr hurr hurr you must be American lololol."
pps. I'm not American.
Maybe you don't understand that RMT destroys the longevity of a game.
The MMORPG companies are depending on certain tasks in these games to take a sufficiently long time to perform so that the players will stay subscribed. By providing a shortcut, RMT reduces the amount of time the companies can expect the players to be subscribed. Or, it means the MMORPG company will have to make the tasks take longer or items more rarer than previously designed in order to retain the customer.
Even if a player does not buy gold through RMT, they are affected indirectly by the methods that the RMT famers use to make their gold. In the case of the game I play, RMT farmers control the price of rare items and useful consumables. They use hacks in the game to obtain exclusivity to certain items. The RMT farmers control pricing on these rare items, either selling through direct RMT the opportunity to obtain the item or selling the items for a high price (real or MMORPG money). They also use bots to obtain ingredients and synth items that are widely used, and sell them for a sufficiently low price that it is unprofitable for any others to make. The use of bots and hacks violates the terms of service of the game, of course.
It should not be fair that someone ruins a game and makes millions doing so.
Furthermore, this guy is very likely a frontman who skims a very high percentage of the payment. Is that fair to the people who actually do the gold farming? Do you realize how many people it takes to farm the the equivalent in MMORPG money that this guy apparently made in real money? In the game I play, if the farmer was playing legitimately (i.e. not using bots or hacks), it should take about 24 hours of continously playing to make the equivalent of $40 USD in MMORPG money. This guy made AT LEAST $1.3 million in real money. That's 325,000 hours of equivalent playing, which works out to be over 37 times the number of hours that there are in a year. And that's only assuming the entire $40 goes to him. The actual amount the farmers make depends upon the take this guy had and the number of accounts each farmer controlled.
The issue wasn't that he wasn't paying taxes. The issue was that he was transferring large amounts of money out of the country. As a tool against money laundering, nearly all banks across the world are required to report any such transfers to the authorities (do a google search for "suspicious transactions").
Since he was a student, there is the natural expectation that he would be bringing money into the country, rather than actively sending it out. If had just deposited the money into a Chinese bank account, the Japanese authorities probably wouldn't have been any the wiser.
This does open up an interesting concept of work. If you create something (online game artifact, video, animation, shareware application) which you do in your spare time while abroad, then market it online, does that constitute work?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I'll report my situation just 2 weeks ago - I live in Japan.
I attempted to wire some money home (about US$3K) to my home bank account via the post office bank. I got a call 3 days later telling me that they didn't like my "reason for transfer" that I'd entered on the form. I put: "to wire myself money to my home account" both in Japanese and in English. Which is the truth.
After bringing in my boss to make sure i"m getting the information correctly, she tells me that they are now stopping all wire transfers in Japan and questioning people why they're sending money. They're trying to be "watchful" for North Korean terrorists. Apparently, when I'd told the guy that I was sending money home to pay for a plane ticket I'd purchased, they felt that 3000 dollars was too much for a plane ticket. I told the guy at the post office that I was sending it home in larger quantities because it costs money to wire money into my bank account.
He then apologized and they transferred my money. Stupid thing is that my the transfer came in too late and I ended up stuck with a 35 dollar service charge for overdrawing my bank account when my credit card company took their payment.
3 stupid things I've learned from this:
1. Japan thinks I"m a North Korean Terrorist.
2. Japan is incredibly trusting - they asked for no documentation to back any of my claims.
3. This process, like a lot of processes in Japan, is completely unfounded, inefficient, and incompetent.
BTW - I am a Japanese citizen.