A Dutch teenager has been arrested and five more questioned by police over alleged cybercrime within Habbo Hotel virtual world, after Sulake alerted the police to a suspected 4,000-Euros worth of theft. It's claimed that the group used fake websites to get other Habbo users to enter their usernames and passwords, then stole their virtual furniture by moving it to their own rooms within the world.
It's interesting seeing the media coverage of the story, since it's tempting for mainstream journalists to see this as a joke, or a crime that doesn't really matter in the scheme of things because it's 'virtual'. That's something Sulake has been keen to dispel, pointing out that all that furniture was paid for with real money. It's an ongoing problem for Habbo Hotel, as well as other virtual worlds:
"Scamming for other people's personal information such as user names has been problematic for quite a while. We have had much of this scamming going on in many countries but this is the first case where the police have taken legal action... We got involved because of an increasing number of sites which are pretending to be Habbo. People might then try and log in and get their details stolen."
As virtual worlds sign up more users, this problem will only increase, posing thorny issues for the companies who run these worlds. Taking Habbo as an example, security firm F-Secure has already
pointed out that there are several hacker applications for Sulake's world, including Habbo Hacker X, Habbo BruteForcer, Habbo Devil and Habbo SpeedKiller, although I don't think all these would be used for theft necessarily.
(via
BBC News)
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