Identity theft: The ultimate role-playing game

Antivirus companies have recently put out an advisory for a piece of malware called “PWSteal.Wowcraft”. And what does this computer virus do? As Symantec describes it:

PWSteal.Wowcraft is a password-stealing Trojan horse that attempts to steal the password to the “World of Warcraft” game and send it to the creator of the Trojan.

This is ever more evidence that the economy of virtual worlds is becoming so lucrative that crime — in all its variants — is moving there. Over the last few years, we’ve seen all manner of chicanery, such as “dupers” that, like real-world counterfeiters, flood game worlds with duplicated merchandise and money, mucking heavily with the world’s currency and economy. There have also lately been on-line muggings, and, as I reported in The Walrus a year ago, mafias and organized crime. Given, of course, that a world based on code is eminently hackable, we’re likely to see ever more — and ever weirder — crimes as time goes on.

At first, when I heard of the Wowcraft trojan, I thought hmmm: Virtual-world crime is considerably easier to pull off than real-world crime, because role-playing games are filled with virtual items that are easy to steal. When you steal someone’s World of Warcraft password, you can go in and force their avatar to hand over all their goods and in-world currency to the criminal’s account, then quickly sell the stuff on ebay or any online game-merchandise site. It’s very easy to make game-world stuff liquid.

But then I realized, hey, how is this different from real-world digital crime? A Russian cracker gang gets the information to your bank account, goes in pretending to be you, transfers the money to a foreign bank, then extracts it and washes it clean. Sure, role-playing games are rife with possibilities for identity theft. But the real world of commerce and finance is itself, by now, almost indistinguishable from a role-playing game.

I can’t wait until a US-based court gets ahold of one of these cases.

(Thanks to Kottke, Steve Emrich and Joe Wilson for these!)


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I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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January 31, 2010 » 07:29 PM
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One of the more interesting trends is family, which came in at number five. Specifically, discussion about family, moms, dads, daughters, etc. jumped during 2009. With Facebook users getting older, this isn’t a big surprise. However, the fact that the mention of “kids” jumped by a factor of five this year is rather dramatic. It’s tough to know what this means, though. (via Facebook Unveils Most-Mentioned Topics of 2009

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BEYOND AWESOME. They are announcing a recall of the Plush Uterus “due to a potential choking hazard for children”. To apply for it, “Please send an email to the address below with the subject line, ‘UTERUS OPT OUT’”.

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