Virtual Thief Caught
You know, I would expect this sort of nonsense in Second Life, but honestly, I'd never even heard of Habbo Hotel before I ran across this story. If you're like me, well, it's an online community based around the titular hotel aimed at teenagers. It's basically a glorified chat room, but then, so is Second Life, really. Oh, and it was created by two Finnish men with names I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce, and after launching in 2000, it has expanded to 31 communities in various countries. How did it hit in 2004 in the US and I never even heard of it? Weird.
Oh, so anyway, the point of this is that one of the game's focus is virtual furniture, which is bought using in-game credits, which are paid for using real-life money. And now Dutch police have arrested a 17-year-old teenager for stealing virtual furniture from Habbo Hotel. He is accused of stealing 4,000 euros worth of not-actually-real-furniture, which tallies out to about $5800. Which is kind of crazy. And a lot. He accomplished the alleged thievery by tricking people into handing over their passwords, which is the oldest trick in the online book. Then he logged into the game and stole their furniture. Rude.
I don't understand the draw of stealing virtual anything, personally. Can you resell it? Because otherwise, he's never going to see any reward aside from having a really fabulous virtual couch in his virtual hotel room.
Teen arrested for "virtual" theft [GamesIndustry.biz]
Wootini
Posted to Video Games on 14 November 2007
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: crime, habbo hotel
In Second Life you can resell anything you own that comes with transfer rights. If he logged on as someone else and stole their furniture directly it means that they probably sell their things no mod/no copy/trans. He then took the items transferred them to himself and probably set up a "yard sale" in SL. Just like iRL people go to yard sales for cheap deals on old furniture and other objects that other people have outgrown. Not uncommon to see high quality stuff at yard sales, probably sold them for 3/4s of the original cost, cashed out the profits.
Err, meant to add that it probably works kinda the same way...
Mm, the only time Habbo really gets in the news is whenever the /b/tards and other fine examples of humanity decide to mount one of their raids. That is, several thousand of them make accounts on the same day, make their avatars look like large-afroed black men in gray suits (the "Nigra"), and proceed to block access to various features by standing in doorways and creating human walls. And all the time they'll be shouting crap like "Pool's closed due to AIDS" and the like, and also sometimes forming human swastikas and other symbols.
Not a new thing. Gaia is pretty bad as well. Mostly because it takes 2 months for a mod to look at a account theft/hacking report.
I was a Hobba (moderator) on Habbo Hotel UK, and as Katsuya said this is nothing new.
It is a sad state when people take other users 'virtual belongings', Habbo has done a lot in the past to make sure users keep their password safe, and for that fact they still do.
I'm happy to see at least someone has been caught, and hopefully this will be a deterrent for other users who wish to spoil it for others.
Bunny
Pool's closed.
What is so difficult about names Sampo Karjalainen and Aapo Kyrölää?