That’s right. A man has been arrested in Japan for computer game crime. He was using bots to beat up player characters, take their stuff and then sell on the computer game black market in the computer game called Lineage II.
Computer games are meant for entertainment, period. People sometimes get a bit further into them than they should. GTA brings that to mind. People have picked up items in these digitized games and turned around and sold them for real money thousands of dollars in some cases. Since there is a perceived value and people have paid money for it, it can be stolen and that’s just what happened here. It doesn’t matter that all this is being done on something that will be obsolete in a year or so. Heck EverQuest set up a network on its own to be able to buy and sell stuff for real money.
A number of nave players were beaten and robbed in-game and had their virtual objects stolen by bots. The items were then fenced on an auction website in Japan. The bot deal made the situation impossible for the player to win.
Some stories went on to discuss this as another form of cyber crime and New Scientist even talked of reports of online scammer sweatshops in countries like China and Indonesia where people monitor teams of bots to generate money and avoid bot traps.
This all seems a bit absurd on the service. Well, not just on the surface but in an era where more and more things are moving to the online world, this kind of stuff is going to continue to occur. The Internet is becoming a more social environment, with games and shopping malls and all kinds of other features, then one can only expect that social problems will go right along with them. I wonder if they virtual pepper spray?
John Stith is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
