Official News - page 9

REAL LIFE NEWS: GAME PASSWORD PHISHING GETS REALLY SERIOUS

by Hazed

Once upon a time we used to occasionally get nasty little oiks trying to get hold of other player's Fed passwords, so they could do nasty things with the character - use it to break the rules, strip it of all its groats, or kill it off out of sheer maliciousness. That's not been a problem so far with Fed2, and let's hope it continues to not be a problem.

The methods the password stealers used were quite simple ones: they'd try to trick people into typing their passwords while they were being spied on, or they'd come up with a plausible technical reason why a player should email the file from the front-end that held the logon details to them.

They didn't usually use threats, or violent behavior. But a report from Brazil says that an armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world's top RPG gamers recently, held a gun to his head, and tried to get his game password out of him.

The captive is the world leader in GunBound, a turn-based RPG-style online game developed in South Korea, involving artillery and battles. The kidnappers decided they could make some quick cash if they could steal his avatar and then sell it for $8,000. The girlfriend of one of the criminals lured the gamer into a fake date using Orkut, Google's social network, and when he arrived at the rendezvous he was snatched by the gang. They hid him away in Sao Paulo and threatened him for five hours.

Despite having a gun held to his head all that time, the gamer refused to divulge his password, at which point the gang gave up and let him go. It didn't turn out well for the crooks: the Brazilian police then caught them.

This defininitely sounds like a good reason to stick to a non-violent game like Fed!

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