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Dutch Teen Arrested for Virtual Property Theft
vuo writes "A story on the BBC website reports that Dutch police have arrested a teenager for robbery of virtual furniture worth roughly $5900. The crime took place in the virtual world/social network Habbo Hotel, a website run by Sulake Corporation. Sulake has 80 million registered users of its sites in 31 countries. ' Habbo users can create their own characters, decorate their own rooms and play a number of games, paying with Habbo Credits, which they have to buy with real cash. "It is a theft because the furniture is paid for with real money. But the only way to be a thief in Habbo is to get people's usernames and passwords and then log in and take the furniture. We got involved because of an increasing number of sites which are pretending to be Habbo. People might then try and log in and get their details stolen."'"
If you have $5900 worth of furniture in your REAL living room.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
The "tangible" loss to the defrauded player is the real-world-currency resale value. In this particular game, this may be $0.
The loss to the game operator is the amount of time and energy it took to detect and unwind the transaction and the amortized cost, spread over all fraudsters, of the security overhead of the game.
The intangible losses include the loss of enjoyment of the furniture by its rightful owner and any time and trouble on his part to get the transaction unwound.
This may be far less than the $5900 stated.
This begs the question:
Why would anyone pay $5900 in real money for furniture in a computer game?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's a coverstory in the Dutch newspaper "Het parool". De guys are accused of *Data destruction and *pc-burglary, both are punible. The main hacker is 17 years old, his companions are 15 years old (4 of them). The boys ar prosecuted by the department of justice, seven reports were filed at the police. I doubt those guys will really get nailed for the theft, but there's a considereable amount of work done to get those fishing techniques and hacking. I think those boys do deserve some penalty. But then again, if it's clear that no-one gets damaged by some online crime, i don't think you deserve any more than a reprimande. After all, we all try to get better from the erros others make...
80 million users?
Why have I never heard of this?
It was my understanding that WoW was the biggest MMO with the most subscribers at around 8 million.