Federal Agents Raid College for Suspected Gold Farming

When I think of

"raiding" and the World of Warcraft, I’m generally thinking about the Blackwing Descent raid encounter that my guild is trying to power through or disposing of the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel with extreme prejudice. 

Never do any of those thoughts feature United States law enforcement kicking in a door or any sort of real life crime.  Recent events may have two students at the University of Michigan seeing things a little bit differently than I do after this week.   A sophomore and a junior in Ann Arbor had their Towers apartment raided by the FBI for the purposes of "potentially fraudulent sales or purchases of virtual currency that people use to advance in the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft."  For those that don’t keep up with MMO vernacular, that’s “gold farming” – acquiring virtual currency then selling it for real world cash.  The two students maintain that agents have the wrong people, as neither of them even play WoW. 

But why should anyone really care?  A common response when I was telling others about this story was some variation on "Come on man, it’s just WoW gold."  Well for starters, not all gold farming is legit (as far as "legit" can properly apply to this practice anyway).  Some of the virtual gold that’s meant to fetch real dollars comes from account theft.  I’ve seen firsthand what happens through guildmates getting their accounts hacked in WoW.  They log in one day, only to find that anything and everything saleable on their person or in their inventory has been cleaned out.  To some gold farmers, that’s most definitely a quicker and easier resource than grinding out quest chains or working the auction house to make some digital dough.  This is one of the four primary reasons I haven’t or won’t ever buy gold for real money.  That full four reason list is as follows:  (1) I’d rather not give some shady person my credit card number; (2) it violates my end-user license agreement and that may open me up to the Blizzard ban hammer; (3) it promotes the practice, which promotes, to some extent, account hacking; and  (4) I already pay almost $200 a year to play.  I don’t want to shell out more.

Article Author: tushar nene

half engineer. half businessman. half IT guy. ALL MAN. tech boss by day, nerd hero by night, exploring how the clash of digital vs. real put an extra spin on all of our lives. follow me on twitter at @tusharnene.

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