Virtual criminals are just human

The Dutch police are latecomers to the scene, having missed the Japanese arrests in 2005 for crimes in Habbo Hotel.
A gang of teenagers made automated characters (known as ‘bots’) to live in the game, attack real characters and steal their money. In 2005 Lineage II artifacts were tradeable on eBay, so this was real violence, real theft, real crime, just perpetrated through a computer.
The South Korean Police have a special unit for virtual crime, the Cyber Crime Investigation Team. In 2003 they had 40,000 habbohotel coins, 22,000 of which were related to games.Â
A suit was filed in New York at the end of last month over unauthorised copying of commercially-available items in Second Life and virtual artifact trading company IGE have attempted to sue game manufacturers after they were blocked for using sweatshops in Mexico.Â
This is without going into the case of Zhu Caoyuan, murdered over the theft of a sword that only existed in the game Legend of Mir 3.Â
The common factor in all these crimes is not that they took place online. Zhu Caoyuan was entirely real. The common factor is money.Â
The sword had been sold for the equivalent of £480. The stolen Habbo furniture was worth nearly £3,000. The Lineage II objects stolen by the Japanese gang’s bots were worth between £10 and £40 each. The Second Life objects were the basis of a growing business.Â
Real money takes a virtual world closer to the real world than it ever could be otherwise. The objects in it matter more and earning money, no matter how small the amounts might be, makes virtual work real, rather than being a game that looks a bit like work from the outside.Â
Like sex, money gets into everything. And once it’s there jealousy, crime and violence won’t be far off.Â
I say that like it’s a bad thing, but in fact it’s just life. That it’s being played out by people pretending to be orcs or giant fluffy man-tigers makes no difference at all.