Will there be real justice for virtual crimes?

The Guardian tells yet another story of gamers duped online:

Inside Eve, one player set up what was called the Eve Intergalactic Bank, offering to let players store their virtual cash in the game currency known as the Inter Stellar Kredit, or ISK. The banker, known as Cally, gave others the chance to deposit their money with the bank and earn a few percent interest – a handy option when the ISK was rapidly depreciating.

Many took Cally up on the offer and deposited their virtual money with the bank, before discovering that it was all an elaborate ruse. Instead of safeguarding the billions invested, Cally made off with the cash – believed to be in excess of 100bn ISK – and is now thought to be living the Eve high life, while hundreds of disgruntled players shake their virtual fists in fury.

Is trust going to become weaker as virtual threats cross into real life? Certainly easy to see how the “billions disappearing” would translate into real people getting really mad. So is it a lesson learned, as part of the virtual risks, or a cause for alarm and for justice to be served? If nothing else it shows how some people have the worst intentions when dealing in an open market, and it makes me wonder how Cally was able to convincingly represent him/herself as a Bank.

2 thoughts on “Will there be real justice for virtual crimes?”

  1. Cally’s victims were those kids who surrendered their fingerprints for lunch, a few years older, and the so-called adults who invest in Nigerian banking scams.

  2. Greg, yes, people are often fooled, especially when faced with new and different circumstances. What does a real bank look like in a virtual world? A market, if not social stability itself, depends on how consistently people can distinguish between a fair exchanges and ones where a party intends to deceive and therefore defraud the other.

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