Saturday, July 4, 2009

Caught stealing virtual money


AN Australian IT worker has been caught stealing virtual money from a popular online game and exchanging it for cold, hard cash.
"Richard" was the 27-year-old CEO of EBank, the player-run financial institution with thousands of clients inhabiting the online world of EVE.

Using the online name of "Ricdic", the married father of two built a reputation as one of EVE's few trusted players - a rare commodity in a game where repeatedly blowing up a violator's spaceship was the only way to enforce some contracts.

More than 300,000 EVE subscribers pay $US15 ($19) a month to play and gain wealth by hard work, manipulating the market, or killing rivals in a distant future where humans have colonised the stars.

Their "money" is handled by EVE's banking system, of which EBank is the largest.

And when CEO Richard made his play, he didn't muck about, embezzling 200 billion interstellar kredits.

Reality check - that's about $5100 to all the humans out there.

And in the world of EVE, it's not actually a crime to embezzle 200 billion interstellar kredits. It could actually be encouraged.

What's not encouraged is trading it for real money, which Richard did, selling other players' kredits to a black market website which in turn sold them on to other players too lazy to earn their own kredits.

"I'm not proud of it at all, that's why I didn't brag about it," Richard said after being banned from the game.

"It was a very on-the-spot decision. I decided to skim off the top, you could say, to overcome real-life (difficulties)."

Richard's moves even sparked a panic run on EBank, as players rushed to withdraw interstellar kredits they feared losing after all that hard work hunting space pirates and mining asteroids.

CCP, the developer of EVE, said it had little sympathy for the players who lost interstellar kredits.

"We have never seen ourselves as gods who make the rules of social interaction," CCP economics advisor Eyjolfur Gudmundsson said.

"You are able to lose the things you have created. That's what makes the world interesting."

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