GOM hacked

Nate Combs alerted me to the following announcement from Jamie Hale, head of Gaming Open Market (the folks who provide a virtual currency market and transfer operation for Second Life, and who used to do it for lots of worlds):

--START EMAIL EXTRACT--
"Well, it happened again. Someone took advantage of us and we have another mess to clean up. Linden Lab noticed the problem early and stepped in and froze all the funds in Zeppi's account so that the fraudster couldn't make off with any. But of course, that prevented a few of you from getting your withdrawals. Rest assured your money (USD and L$) are safe - we just have to sift through the records to figure out who owes what to whom. If you have "lost" any L$ in the past day, please reply to this email with the details (time and avatar name) and I'll add it to the list to correct.

You'll notice the site is locked out. We decided to close the doors for a bit while we get things under control. I know this is a pain for some of you, and I'm really sorry. I'm also sorry because I've been ignoring the bazillions of IMs I've been getting. I'm not trying to be rude. Just trying to get things ironed out so we can get return to service as quickly as possible.

The in-world ATMs have been collected because we figured while we were down cleaning things up, we'd touch up the ATM scripts which have been crufting up over the past few months.

Once again, I apologize for any inconveniences. We'll be up and running very soon, and your money and L$ are, as usual, completely safe. You're welcome to confirm that with your local Linden."
--END EMAIL EXTRACT--

I wondering whether this sort of activity gets reported to local law enforcement. The Secret Service who (if I remember my Hollywood movies correctly) is responsible for investigations of currency crimes (and who have a nifty badge). Of course there is the definitional question of whether this is currency, though much of what the Secret Service investigates is more properly characterized as "financial crime". Then of course there are the various agencies (local, state and national) who deal with fraud. Even without an expansive definition of "currency" it's a no-brainer to see this as a fraud against the game developer, the players, or the third-party arbitrage site.

Anyone out there got any indication of enforcement actions taken against these (increasingly common) hacks?

Comments

[Jamie Hale]

I wouldn't say "hacked" - just scammed again. Same deal, different source IPs.

We're beefing up security, tweaking our limits and adding some new alerts. We'll survive. :)

[Corey]

I (and most virtual retailers) deal with same security type issues that you're dealing with Jamie. I've always been interested in what steps other people take to try and prevent fraud. I don't think it's a good idea to openly discuss procedures, since we'd basically be tipping off potential scammers, but an exchange of information regarding this subject might be beneficial.

I have a feeling a lot of these guys go from one virtual currency/item provider to the next scamming each one of us. It'd be very useful to compile a directory of offenders that could be referenced. This would obviously have to be strictly moderated and I don't know enough about the legal side of things to know if something like this could be considered libel (it's true so it shouldn't be right?) or what other privacy related laws are in place. Since most of us don't communicate with each other, these guys can move freely about the virtual market running scam after scam.

UOTreasures does has a running list of eBay/PayPal scammers posted as sticky on their forums.

[ludlow]

good point. There needs to be a community wide ban list set up.

[blaze]

Maybe that should have been "GOM Hacked?" at least. It wasn't hacked, as Jamie has pointed out, but simply been the victim of chargeback fraud. A very very common occurence on the web that every single online business must deal with (and offline businesses).

Notice how ludlow picked it up and restated your headline. No doubt this is going to traverse the Web and possibly leak into corporate media.

Let's all be a little more careful here and do a little research about what we say before we start shooting ourselves in our virtual feet..

[blaze]

Otherwise next thing you know everyone is going to go around saying that Everquest has an economy larger than Russia .. errr

[Matt Mihaly]

Just a note about the Secret Service, having dealt with them on more than one occasion in the past: It's pretty hard to interest them unless there's at least $50,000 in losses.

--matt