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Criminals target on-line Gamers
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by: Lance Chambers
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Any serious on-line gamer knows that
items that you pick up in the cauldron of battle in your virtual world
can be sold to other players for real money, sometimes for thousands of
dollars.
Given there is money involved you can guarantee that real-world cyber criminals will get involved and they have!
Accounts in MMORPG games like World of Warcraft can be worth a lot of
money as the players collect virtual items that can alter the
capabilities of the player involved. So identity theft is being used to
transfer control of these items to the criminal with the objective of
selling off anything they can.
Mikko Hypponen, a security specialist at F Secure,
said that most identity theft is through the use of Trojans. These are
often 'sold' as programs that will give players special abilities and
are mostly distributed via e-mail or in chat rooms - beware!
Dave Weinstein, a software engineer with Microsoft, said at the
annual Gamefest Conference that, "The police are really good at
understanding 'someone stole my credit card and ran up a lot of money.'
It's a lot harder to get them to buy into 'someone stole my magic
sword.'"
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