The ancient art of cleaning money is coming to the digital age, at least if a report from the financial watchdog AUSTRAC is to be believed. Virtual worlds and MMOs offer criminals an opportunity to convert their dirty money into game resources, which can then be reconverted into shiny clean cash. While there is no present evidence this is happening on any large scale, the vulnerability is there, and the chance of criminal organizations turning their attention to virtual worlds will only increase as more money pours into the cyberscape. Already, phishing and gold farming operations show the potential for organized mischief in online games. Computerworld has the story.
As if spammers, gold farmers, eBayers, and other assorted online scum weren’t enough. The only thing that’s saved us from laundering organizations taking over our games is the scale of the operations. It’s been estimated that criminal enterprise pulls down some 5% of the entire world’s GDP. That’s a lot of Warcraft gold.