Thursday, December 11, 2008

GAMES AND THE LAW

Me and my barkada in undergrad met while playing the game, Ragnarok Online. We would spend almost all of our free time in playing the game. We invest our time and money to get far and become more powerful. It made us sad, frustrated and angry when we learn that one of us had been hacked. Items are gone, they used the account to scam people, the characters’ builds have been ruined. The company, Level Up Inc., does not entertain hacking cases and turns our attention to file the case to the NBI. At this point, we give up of ever reporting the case to anyone. The process seemed to tiresome and would probably lead to no result, our hardwork would be wasted. We wondered if they even have the technology to be able to track those culprits down? Do they have the expertise to know what to trace? We doubted it.

Up to this day, I have heard of no one in the community who has filed a case. It seemed to us a daunting task with no result. Until there are improvements made, it seems to be a dead-end.

2 comments:

Sonia Bea said...

I used to play RO too. While I've never been hacked, my brother has and he was very disheartened to find out that he couldn't do a thing about it. It was during my gaming days in RO that I found out there was actually an Anti-Fraud and Cybercrime Division at the NBI. But up until now I haven't heard of a single RO-related hacking case they've handled successfully. I guess there just isn't much money to be made from kids who depend on their parents for their allowance.

Rex Giron said...

One possible reason why there hasn't been any publicized occurrence of an avid gamer pursuing a hacking case involving an online game account is because the process and costs of pursuing the investigation as well as filing such a case is just too cumbersome.
More often than not, a player who had his account hacked, would more likely just create another account and start over. Likely it is also that he will post numerous rants about how his account got hacked in the forums of his online game of choice.

Most of the methods that i know of related to hacking an account involves the use of "keyloggers". These keyloggers are small programs that run on the background of an operating system that records the keystrokes of a user a creates a log file of it. It is from this log that the hacker identifies the username and password of an unsuspecting user. Players who rent PC's in computer shops are the usual victims of such a scheme, because all the hacker would need to do is rent the station that the Player rented to get the log of his keystrokes. Up to this day, i havent heard of a gaming account being hacked by means of access from another computer.