Feds Seek Terrorist In Virtual Worlds
Two college students are currently under investigation for potentially fraudulent sales or purchases of virtual currency used in the popular online role-playing game “World of Warcraft."
Points to Consider:
The students insist they are innocent but during the recent raid Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents seized their laptop computers, hard drives, video game systems, credit cards, cell phones, paperwork and other computer equipment. The bust was part of a larger FBI investigation into gold farming, where people legally and illegally sell virtual goods or services for real life cash. Consider that a 2010 Canadian Botnet Analysis Report describes a "dark universe" where "virtual world terrorism facilitates real world terrorism, by recruiting, training, and supporting potential terrorists. The report found that virtual worlds are also allegedly capable of being used for "covert" communication between cells, and funding their activities, allowing players to conduct real-money transactions (RMT’s) in virtual worlds which permits an unregulated currency exchange of virtual credits for real funds. The report concluded that; "‘Gold farming' operations of criminal organizations is just one of the novel means of exploiting the medium. Be aware that one recommendation contained in a 2008 data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence, tasked the intelligence community to develop software designed to detect violent extremists infiltrating massive online multiplayer games. The initiative called the Reynard project aimed to profile online gaming behavior, in order to attain its ultimate goal of “detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world."
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