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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."'"
The Habbo admins/GMs/whatever can recreate the furniture for free! (I should hope so) So nothing is lost!
If there's an issue with people hacking the game, deal with it in terms of hacking, not 'theft'.
"I only speak the truth"
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How the fuck can there be theft in a world where the game administrators can reinstitute the guy's property WITH THE PUSH OF A BUTTON? It's not like this kid has "deprived" anybody of anything that can't be instantly recreated. Hell, applying the word "create" is even too generous.
The lunatic who spent $5900 on "virtual furniture" needs to be committed to a small, padded cell until he can get a grip on reality. And if the game admins refuse to give the furniture back to him, toss them in jail for fraud. And charge the kid with cracking, that's all he did.
This isn't cute. It's fucking nuts, and it scares the crap out of me that people are losing their grip on reality and people might go to prison for it. Holy shit.