Online Gaming and Fraud in Massive Multiplayer Online...

1. Online Gaming Security and Fraud Throughout the evolution of gaming, there has been a movement of large communities to online gaming. With that high amount of traffic, these online games have become prime targets for crime to emerge from. Due to the online nature and virtual elements of this kind of community, the most common type of crime committed was theft, followed closely by fraud (Chen 2005). With the increase in online communities from online gaming, businesses have started advertising both to these markets and through them. This has opened up not only the online communities to the threat of fraud, but also those businesses and their competitors. This paper will focus primarily on the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) community, and the ways that fraud is committed in that type of gaming. 2.1 Fraud in MMORPGs Fraud has been influencing MMORPGs and online gaming for years. The world of online has moved from being a software license industry to an uplink time payment model due to illegal sharing and software copying (Chen 2005). With the move to subscription based gameplay, in game items now have a monetary value due to the growth of economies that trade the virtual game money or items for real world currency (Chen 2005). Throughout the MMORPGs there has been a trend of criminals targeting the users of these online games for purposes of theft and fraud, especially when it comes to the in game currencies and identities. According to a study