The $10,000 WoW account sale
September 26, 2007 by davidgrundy
The BBC have reported this week that a player has sold his WoW account for £5,000 in a confirmed sale ($10,000). While admittedly the Account had the most highly geared rogue currently in the game on it. It does start to beg the question of the size of this secondary market. Already we’ve heard/read that MMO players are specifically being targeted by more trojans and virus simply because a MMO account can actually be more valuable to sell to a hacker than bank account details… with the added bonus of selling a virtual game character doesn’t have you pulling the same jail time as getting caught ripping off banks.
But I’d also raise the added question: Are we underestimating the size of these secondary markets? Are we underestimating the value of them. Certainly there was a few interesting insights into this on the Virtual Economy Blog a few months back and the end result has to be, while we are uncertain of an absolute figure, the one thing we are certain of is, as the MMO market is becoming larger, so, unsurprisingly, is the secondary market. And, coincidentally, and unfortunately, the criminal market.
Certainly it should come of no shock to us that if you can rip off a few passwords, sell something on an auction site and within a few minutes gain a paypal cheque for the proceeds, criminals might be interested, and Sergey Golovanov here gives us a very good review of the methods which are being used… or could be used, by such criminals.
With this in mind I suppose the main questions to be raised are all regarding internet security. To quote the latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report:
“Online gaming is becoming one of the most popular Internet activities. Recently, a study indicated that
unique visitors to online gaming sites reached 217 million worldwide. In 2007, the online game market in
China alone is expected to grow by 35 percent, where there were 30 million Internet gamers by the end of
2006. Online games often feature goods, such as prizes, that are exchanged by players, often for money.
The total annual wealth created within virtual worlds has been placed at approximately 10 billion USD. As
such, it is not surprising that attackers appear to be turning their attention to these games”
If organised criminals are getting involved in targeting MMO accounts for easy money, we should ask ourselves the question of a) how far behind are other underground groups searching for easy money, and b) more importantly, how do we go about making these computer games more secure.
I think the question of security around not just virtual worlds but also many of the social networking platforms is one of the more interesting problems around. I’ll re-post when I’ve solved it!!
Nice post. RJ