I saw a recent article from Reuters on an embezzlement from a virtual bank in the game "EVE Online". This article raises some very interesting questions about the future of crime and what we may, or may not, be able to do about it.
I personally find EVE Online to be one of the most interesting games on the internet at the moment, more so even than World of Warcraft, although WoW has a lot more flashy colors, it lacks the economic depth to make this kind of crime more difficult. EVE basically lets players do almost anything they want with their money and provides tools to do so more easily, like selling shares in your company, charging taxes, docking fees, etc. It's something of a sandbox economy, the games creators put in a number of rules on how things work, but the players can then make up whatever rules they want within that system. It's like creating the rules of physics and then seeing how people try to make a plane.
The biggest problem with the game's sandbox though comes from players who break contracts, since it's an online game you can't arrest them and there's no "real" crime involved.
Also in a game, people have the ability to do something that a criminal in the real world would be hard pressed to accomplish, namely change their name, or transfer all their assets to someone else and not have anyone be the wiser. So if someone cheats you at the game, by robbing the bank, backstabbing you, selling your secrets to an enemy, etc, there's not really a whole lot you can do.
For purposes of a game like EVE, that's not so incredibly bad, if you lose money, it sucks for you as there's no virtual FDIC to help you get your money back, but it's probably not going to be the end of the world for you. However, virtual economies are becoming increasingly linked, for good or ill, to the real economy. People violate terms of service routinely to sell gold in World of Warcraft, ISK, the curreny of EVE, and other types of money for other games. As time goes by, the difference between virtual money and real money will increasingly blur. The problem with money, more than any other virtual property is that money itself is an illusion that's given value solely by what you can do with it. Saying something is "virtual currency" is, in many ways, redundant.
So we are at the point where we have to start deciding if we want to start having "real world" penalties and enforcement for what occurs in a game. If you are running a virtual bank and you steal people's money, should there be some consequence? Or do we want to let that kind of thing go? Will virtual crime lead to real crime? Will the cross-over between virtual money and real money cause problems in transactions in the future? What about people who use virtual currencies to launder money? You can buy WoW gold with a fake identity from a Chinese gold farmer who could care less about verifying who you are, and then sell that gold on your own to someone else and possibly transfer real money across national boundaries without taxation, regulation or any legal oversight at all.
Criminal enterprises are already looking at ways to expand into the digital realm to gain power, blackmail of people using sexual services, has already become a problem, it's only a matter of time until this rest of this becomes a huge problem too.
So my question to you is, what should we do about this? What role does the United States need to play to take the lead on this, what should Congress be doing, if anything, and what lessons can we learn from virtual currencies and the problems it has, that may apply to "real" money?