Time to crack down on sales of dragon's gold - securobods

Security researchers have urged gaming companies to crack down on virtual currency auction and sales sites, reckoning criminals are cashing in to launder stolen money. The research team at Trend Micro says most black hats steal the currency using online game exploits or by using malware and phishing to compromise players, …

[salamamba too]

Only taken a few years for the Securobods to catch on - maybe someone lent them an old copy of Halting State or Reamde ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gold sellers are rife in WoW and Blizz seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Hardly suprising it's seen as an untraceable way of laundering money.

[Kubla Cant]

Confused

The article starts off talking about money laundering, then conflates that with theft of game (and real) currency from players' accounts.

Money laundering is about concealing the origin of money that has already been criminally obtained. So it involves buying stuff and reselling it. If you steal money in a game, then you have a bigger laundering problem.

[Danny 14]

I imagine it would be quicker to go buy paysafe cards from newsagents. A trawl around every spa shop in town will get you a few thousand in paysafe cards, those are then untraceable and can be used/sold on.

[Steven Roper]

Paysafe cards is one way of doing it

Another laundering technique I've seen used is going to the local casino, buying a stack of ships, having a bit of a tipple on the tables, and then cashing the remaining chips back out and getting a receipt identifying the money as a casino win. You can clean small amounts less than $10k this way.

An even safer method is to bypass the casino and clean it through the poker machines in pubs instead. Nobody looks twice at someone pumping a few grand through the pokies in most pubs around my town.

One guy I knew many years ago ran a pizza shop for several years, and apparently sold a lot more pizzas than were actually going out the door; the majority of his profits were coming from something a little greener than pizzas. He only got caught because an audit showed the number of pizzas sold couldn't be accounted for against the relatively small amounts of ingredients he was buying: I think it worked out something like a tablespoon's worth of dough per 12" pizza!

It was a pity since if you knew the guy well enough, for a small extra fee he was quite happy to add some home-grown ingredients to your pizza that most definitely weren't on the menu, which made his pizzas a lot more enjoyable to eat than your average ones!

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Re: Paysafe cards is one way of doing it

Book tip: Avery Corman - The Bust-Out King. Old school scamming and laundering, but quite transferable to the digital age. Quite funny too.