Virtual Fraud making news at Virtual Goods Summit

McAfee now sees more malware programmed to steal passwords for World of Warcraft now than trojans aiming for banking information, said Craig Schumager of the McAfee research labs. In talks with Erik Larkin at PCWorld.com, he outlined why fake game gold is more attractive than real money. Primarily, there’s less risk of getting caught and easier punishments for hacking World of Warcraft than Bank of America, but the gold is still easily commutable to real-world dollars and cents.

At the Virtual Goods Summit last Friday, there was a fair amount of talk around virtual gold fraud.  Organized crime is involved with virtual gold as a money laundering tool. It’s a simple matter to buy the gold on a gray market for illegal money and then resell it in a legitimate market for funds that can be declared. The entire conversation is worth a read, but here are the highlights.

As Brock Pierce of  Affinity Media (formerly  IGE), put it “Fraud in the secondary market is rampant. On eBay, secondary sales were resulting in 10 percent fraud at one point I think. Someone in Russia could login through a proxy to a server in the US and make a purchase with a stolen card, turn around and resell it on the secondary market, and sell it for 75 percent in a matter of minutes. Organized crime is involved, and it’s anonymous.“

Or as Raph Koster put it: “I described this years ago at a social policy conference. And they [the government representatives] said, ‘Well it’s not drug money, but it is terrorist money.’ The government will get interested.”

Post from Virtual World News