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Professional Ethics Mälardalens högskola Västerås, 2007-11-28 Mikael Svensson. Scamming & Fraud in Onlinegame Communities. What is an online game?. Often refered to as MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games)
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Professional Ethics Mälardalens högskola Västerås, 2007-11-28 Mikael Svensson Scamming & Fraud in Onlinegame Communities
What is an online game? Often refered to as MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games) Ultima Online (the first graphical mmorpg, also refered to as the first successful one) Dark Age of Camelot, EverQuest, Eve Online, World of Warcraft, Lineage, Second Life, Lord of The Rings Online, Project Entropia
Ingame economy Do your job, get your wages, do the normal stuff every normal citizen does. Just like the real world, a real economy. (In this case it could be - go out and slay monsters in some enchanted forest) Different currencies
Playerbase (attracts who) Men and woman in all ages People who want to interact online with other players instead of playing the regular games versus the computer People who just want to have fun and make an escape into a world of wonders People who have economic interests seeing this as a way to make money
Why the scam? It originally came from people who wanted to leapfrog into the game, to skip the hard parts. Game laziness more than greed There's a growing awareness in the game community that the weapons, characters, currencies and other virtual goods in online games can be traded for real-world cash Online market contains about 5% scam
What constitutes a scam and how it is made • A scam is the act of acquiring assets from another player through misinformation, confusion and pressure, or by taking advantage of basic trust • Mailing people with fraud information • Sniffing traffic to obtain sensitive data such as login information to accounts • The use of Trojans or keyloggers
How to protect yourself If it sounds too good to be true, probably is Display trust with precaution Be cautious in the alliances you make Take note of the name of the player you are trading with Make sure you are talking to the correct person Limit the information you give to others
Is there a second hand market? eBay and IGS (and various other sites) As soon as you have assets that are valuable, that are electronically tradable, then you have the opportunity for really massive fraud because it's worth the scammers' time to try to extract those assets
Legal issues At the moment there are no rules that can be applied to the online world to decide if the in-game assets really count as personal possessions if they are owned by some company creating all this data Chinese companies and organizations are trying to get new laws for online worlds
Solutions • Sony Online Entertainment recently overcame its longstanding resistance to trading real cash for virtual assets by Creating its own marketplace. Sony rationalised the move by saying it could control fraud in its own auction system.
Moral and Ethical problems Killing, stealing, scamming and its acceptance How to make the rules and laws? Stupid is what stupid does Right or wrong? Separation between real and virtual worlds