When the Game Gets Real: How Gaming is Contributing to Real-World Crime

Whenever we hear about a violent tragedy, common scapegoats for this calamity are the video gamers who spend hours of their day running over people or shooting zombies in virtual worlds. While there are plenty of innocent gamers who are simply entertaining themselves, people with a much more malicious agenda are manipulating and abusing these same games to develop schemes, participate in money laundering, and even plot real violence. This is virtual crime, and, according to Wikipedia, is a criminal act that takes place inside MMOs (massively multiplayer online games).

According to authorities, a group of trained North Korean computer experts converted fake currency into legal tender playing MMOs. The website reports that they programmed dozens of computers to autoplay two popular games – Lineage II and Dungeon Fighter – around the clock, doing nothing but collecting gold. Then, they converted the fake currency into real money by selling it through auction websites, accumulating about $6 million. According to The New York Times, some of the money was used to help finance the North Korean nuclear weapons program. The Times reported: “The North Korean computer experts were each required to send at least $500 a month back to the Pyongyang government, the police said. It remained unclear how much of the rest of their profits they pocketed for themselves, given different layers of party and military officials involved in a typical illicit operation.”

Secondly, with the advancements of text and voice chatting within video games, mobsters have reportedly used games to launder money and order hits. Journalist Misha Glenny’s investigation revealed that mobsters and drug lords have used gold from World of Warcraft and transferred it to players in other countries, where it is then converted into U.S. dollars. Cracked.com also reports that international gangs are using voice-chatting to communicate and may have used it to order at least one murder. The website reasons that the method of communication makes sense: text messages, calls, and emails can be tracked and monitored, but who is paying attention to verbal exchanges in video games?

Online gaming has even caused deaths and several suicides. News agencies have reported tragic cases of teens and adults engrossed or addicted to games such as Everquest and Warcraft III committing suicide. Gamers have also been charged and found guilty in the deaths of family members, friends, and strangers. In 2011, a Florida mom was given 50 years in prison after she pleaded guilty to shaking her 3-month-old son while playing the Facebook game Farmville. In 2003, a teenage fan of the Grand Theft Auto series who had played the game for months, went on a killing spree after being brought to a police station on suspicion of stealing a car. The teen, Devin Moore, reportedly told police, "Life is like a video game. Everybody's got to die sometime."

Finally, online gaming is seeping into the real world so much in some areas, that drastic, seemingly-bizarre monitoring is now required. South Korea actually employs a Cyber Terror Response Center, active since 2000 and boasting 1,000 agents by 2011. Last year, Seoul recruited 30 students to be trained at its new school for cyberwarfare, so that those in the South Korean army could “seek to nurture warriors to fight in cyberwarfare amid growing cyber terror threats from North Korea and to secure a stable supply of specialists,” it said in a statement.

The United States has followed these efforts. An initiative dedicated to learning how to spy on MMO players – the Reynard project – was unveiled in 2008, with the idea being to prevent terrorists from abusing gaming technology by recruiting members and sending orders through World of Warcraft characters. It seeks to profile online gaming behavior that could potentially translate into real-world problems. As reported by Wired.com, “The cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.”