Virtual furniture popular with thieves.
November 15, 2007 1:24 pm
Second Life seems to be not the only ‘virtual world’ suffering from furniture thieves: a Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing virtual furniture from “rooms” in Habbo Hotel, a 3D social networking website.
The 17-year-old boy from the Netherlands is being accused of stealing virtual furniture, paid for by the owners with hard First Life cash, for a total worth of 5,000 euro’s.
A spokesman for Sulake, the company that operates Habbo Hotel, said: “The accused lured victims into handing over their Habbo passwords by creating fake Habbo websites. In Habbo, as in many other virtual worlds, scamming for other people’s personal information such as user names has been problematic for quite a while. We have had much of this scamming going on in many countries but this is the first case where the police have taken legal action.“
I wonder if the boy will be punished for stealing furniture or for breaching accounts, abuse of the Habbo Hotel trademark and fraude? ;)
Hat tip to Veronique Kaminski
More about this? BBC News
Tags: crimes committed in virtual worlds, habbo hotel, metaverse



6 Responses to “Virtual furniture popular with thieves.”
Before I put up my security on my new estate, some jackass wandered onto my property and found that several items in my house were marked for sale at Zero. I don’t know WHY - I suspect that back in my noob days I got them out of a freebie box and never checked them. This idiot then BOUGHT my stuff, but left it there.
I realize, my fault, I was way too old an AV not to have check that stuff but I was SO pissed off. I IMd him and got no response.
The thing that makes me maddest is that he bought this couch that I’ve never seen anywhere else on SL……..and I loved it.
I did have someone orbit him, though, so that made me feel better.
By orbiting him, did you get the furniture back ? :-)
Reminds me of that incident involving an unsecured Estate that had stuff set for sale, but at L$0, and OnRez catalogued it, resulting in tons of people stealing the stuff… They later contacted the people, most handed the stuff in without asking anything, while some asked for L$ and some even said no. The stuff was set to “For Sale: L$0 (Original)”, so that was a big issue. Which is why I use my self-created encrypted servers and vendors only! ‘^_^
I hate bugs… And I guess OnRez don’t need that old indexing service anymore due to the new Second Life Search?
I did not get it back.
But, I was childishly gratified…….
hee :)
“I wonder if the boy will be punished for stealing furniture or for breaching accounts, abuse of the Habbo Hotel trademark and fraude? ;)”
He will be accused of several things, starting with the hacking of accounts, which is already punishable.
But to try to set a precedent, they also filed an accusation for theft.
It will indeed be interesting to see what will come out of it.
Indeed. I’ll need to read virtually blind a bit more. =) I was very disappointed about the Bragg ft. Linden being settled. :(
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