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Man Arrested For RuneScape MMORPG Online Robbery

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the doing-pretend-work-for-pretend-boots dept.

Unexpof writes "A man has been arrested by the British Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), accused of stealing the usernames and passwords from players of the RuneScape MMORPG. Security experts report that this is one of the first occasions when a Brit has been apprehended for 'virtual robbery,' although incidents have happened in the past. For instance, the CEO of the sci-fi trading game EVE Online stole 200 billion 'kredits,' which he then used as a deposit on a real-world house, and in October last year a Japanese woman was arrested by police after allegedly hacking her virtual husband 'to death.'"

3 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. The difference is by jforr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    He hacked the logins which is pretty much equivalent to hacking an email account. The eve online thefts were all perpetuated via in-game mechanisms and since the game's terms state that all in-game items are property of the maker of the game, there was no actual IRL theft to prosecute.

  2. Re:Reality check by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Censoring your slashdot password is built into the IP protocol itself, so wherever you post it, it will be asterisked out.

    See: *******

    blah!

  3. Re:Interstellar kredits by Apatharch · · Score: 1, Interesting

    They deliberately misspelled the word so that the acronym would match the ISO 4217 code for the Icelandic Krona.