REAL LIFE NEWS: IN-GAME PURCHASES USED TO LAUNDER MONEY
by Hazed
Many online games are free to play but require players to make in-game purchases of things in order to progress. In many games you can spend real money to speed your way through the game.
Fed doesn’t do things that way – our slithy toves give you interesting goodies but none of them are necessary so you can play without ever paying anything, nor can you buy your way up the ranks with slithies. We’d probably have made a lot more money if we’d found a way to make advancement genuinely depend on buying slithies!
But anyway… those other games have found themselves the targets of money launderers, according to a report. Credit card thieves use stolen cards to buy items in games such as Clash of Clans and Marvel Contest of Champions, and then resell the resources to other players.
The report describes how it’s done. By setting up multiple email accounts the miscreants can then automate the creation of accounts on the games, then try multiple credit cards until a valid one is found. You can read more details about how it works at the source link.
The companies that run the game have policies meant to prevent the third-party selling of game items such as gems or gold, but they don’t seem to work very well against this kind of systematic abuse.
Maybe it’s just as well Fed’s slithies are not that valuable!
Source: https://kromtech.com/blog/security-center/digital-laundry
