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Chinese Prisoners Forced To Scam Gaming Sites

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When you think “prison camp,” you probably don’t picture a place resembling summer camp, with arts and crafts, hiking, swimming, and playing games. But in the Jixi prisoner labor camp in the coalmines of northeast China, they break rocks all day and play games at night.

Online games often reward players who accumulate a certain quantity of in-game points with cash payouts. Guards at this particular prison camp forced prisoners to do 12-hour shifts playing games, on top of their manual labor.

One former Jixi prisoner told The Guardian, “If I couldn’t complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things.”

These prisoners were “gold farming,” monotonously repeating basic tasks within online games like World of Warcraft, in order to build up virtual currency. Gamers around the world are willing to pay real money in exchange for online credits, speeding up their progress within the game.

People in many developing countries have turned to gold farming in order to support themselves, but up to 80% of the world’s gold farmers are based in China, where as many as 100,000 people work around the clock to earn virtual points.

Game operators lose profits due to forced labor gold farming, and while they certainly want to stem their losses, they also have a humanitarian responsibility to the victims of this crime. iovation’s ReputationManager 360 is a proven service that helps protect against chargebacks, virtual asset theft, gold farming, code hacking, and account takeovers. The service identifies devices and shares their reputation as they are interacting with the game – setting off alerts that could relate to velocity triggers, geolocation, device anomalies, past gold farming abuse, financial fraud and lots more.

Many leading gaming publishers have been using iovation’s device reputation service for years to prevent game abuse upfront and ensure that their players have a safe and fun experience. These gaming publishers and iovation continually share information, the latest trends and best practices in order to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.

Robert Siciliano, personal security and identity theft expert contributor to iovation, discusses credit card fraud on NBC Boston. Disclosures

North Korea Hacks Online Games to Fund Terrorism?

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The Guardian reports, “South Korean police recently arrested five people who allegedly collaborated with North Korean hackers to steal millions of dollars in points from online gaming sites. Members of the gang, which included North Korea’s technological elite, worked in China and shared profits after they sold programs that allowed users to rack up points without actual play.”

Scammers resell stolen points to gamers, who use the points to play more games or to purchase equipment or accessories for their avatars. According to Seoul police, the cybercriminals behind this particular scheme made $6 million in less than two years. 55% of that went to the team of hackers, while some went to Kim Jong-il’s multibillion-dollar slush fund, which American and South Korean officials say is at least partially used to fund a nuclear weapons program.

South Korean officials blame the North Korean government’s Computer Center, an IT research venture, for orchestrating the fraud.

Many of the world’s largest gaming publishers and digital goods providers rely on iovation’s ReputationManager 360 to detect fraud upfront through its extensive, globally-shared database of 700 million devices seen connecting to online businesses and the 6 million fraud events already associated with many of these devices.

iovation has already flagged more than 13 million activities within gaming sites for gaming publishers to either reject as completely fraudulent, or to send for manual review as high-risk activity was detected in real time. This has saved gaming publishers millions of dollars in fraud losses by not only stopping a fraudulent activity (such as a cyber criminal setting up a new account in the game, or a purchase from the in-game store using stolen credentials), but it connects cyber criminals working together so that the publisher can identify entire fraud rings and shut them down at once.

Gaming operators can customize business rules around geolocation, velocity, and negative device histories (including gold farming, code hacking, virtual asset theft, and policy violations) to identify nefarious accounts activity, or fraudulent use of stolen accounts. More than 2,000 fraud-fighting professionals contribute to iovation’s global database every single day, continuously strengthening the system while maintaining a safe and inviting environment for their players.

Robert Siciliano, personal security and identity theft expert contributor to iovation, discusses credit card fraud on NBC Boston. Disclosures