Spurred on by the rapid advancements in Internet speed and technology, a multitude of virtual worlds have evolved to enable people to live a second “virtual” life. To virtual world residents wizards, warriors and witches are nothing new; they are part of the virtual world that they inhabit for many hours each day. The residents have established real communities with cities, land, property, money and relationships. The biggest threat to their virtual world is that they have been joined by real life criminals eager to commit traditional crimes in the virtual world. The crimes include the traditional frauds theft, deception and money laundering, to extortion, robbery, burglary, rape and murder.

Examples include:

• Residents having their virtual homes invaded by gangs who kick them out of the house and steal all their virtual goods.
• The theft of powerful magic items that in some cases took hundreds of hours of game time or real world cash to acquire.

The value of the transactions can be quite staggering for people to understand. For example in 2009 the record for the most expensive item bought and sold was broken, when the prized Crystal Palace Space Station in Entropia Universe sold for $330,000 US dollars.

Entropia Universe reportedly has a registered user base of around 890,000 and In 2009 the economic turnover of “Planet Calypso” (the first planet in Entropia) was $422 million USD. These facts give some insight to the popularity of online gaming and specifically virtual worlds and their economic impact. Virtual worlds are generally ungoverned, without laws or regulation, and a tempting place for the modern criminal to commit crimes and launder money virtually undetected and without any threat of enforcement.

The gap between the real world (Meatspace) and the virtual economies have narrowed so much that it is very easy to transfer criminal gains from the virtual to the real world. A good example of this is the creation of Mind Bank AB. In March 2009 the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority granted MindArk, the creators of the Entropia Universe, a license to conduct legal banking activities through its subsidiary Mind Bank AB. In effect, this allowed MindArk to operate Mind Bank AB as a fully functioning bank within the Entropia Universe, providing real world banking functions to all virtual worlds running on the Entropia Universe platform.

Jan Welter Timkrans, the CEO of MindArk said, “Together with our partner planet owner companies we will be in a position to offer real bank services to the inhabitants of our virtual universe In effect we have bridged real world money to the virtual world”.

This makes the issue of virtual world crime a real world problem and raises many questions regarding jurisdiction, investigation, evidence gathering and prosecution of virtual world crimes by real world investigators. Traditionally in computer crime investigations the evidence resides on a physical medium a computer, hard drive or cell phone. If the evidence is in transit then it can normally be captured across the network and the offender can be tracked to a location or end point. In a virtual world crime the evidence might only exist in a program running on a remote server, for example the stolen magic sword might actually be made up of fields in a database. In addition “Meatspace” laws and enforcement agencies are often unwilling or ill-prepared to deal with these issues despite the real financial cost to the victims.

You might be thinking what does this have to do with my company or my clients; we do not operate in a virtual world or buy or sale magic swords? There are several scenarios you may want to consider.

• An employee uses corporate computer systems to access a virtual world and while there commits a virtual crime, i.e. steals from other players, introduces malware into the game etc. As awareness of these incidents increases where is the corporate liability? Can the corporation be liable, considering that their computers were used to commit the theft, or their computers were used to attack the game with malware?
• Gaming addiction leads to misappropriation of corporate funds for use within the game.
• Social engineering of your employees within the game puts corporate financing or secrets at risk.
• File sharing and other capabilities of the virtual world software exposes the corporate network to malware or intrusion.

What actions could you take? Where would you report? Would the police be capable of responding?

Is your organization ready to deal with and react to a virtual world crime?

EFS offer a free series of educational sessions for businesses on cybercrime, computer forensics and virtual world crime; please contact us for more information.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 29th, 2010 at 07:28 and is filed under Thoughts & Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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