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London,
July 4, 2009 – Space trading game Eve Online has suffered a virtual
version of the credit crunch.
One of the game's biggest financial institutions lost a significant
chunk of its deposits as a huge theft started a run on the bank.
One of the bank's controllers stole about 200bn kredits and swapped them
for real world cash of £3,115.
As news of the theft spread, many of the bank's customers rushed to
remove their virtual cash.
Space scandal
The theft from EBank took place in early June but only now have details
emerged about the amount of money stolen and why it was taken.
The theft was carried out by EBank's chief executive, a player known as
Ricdic, now known to be a 27-year-old Australian who works in the
technology industry. His full identity has not been revealed save that
his first name is Richard.
The stolen kredits amounted to 8% of the 2.6tn that Ebank had in its
virtual vaults.
"Basically this character was one of the people who had been running
EBank for a while. He took a bunch of (virtual) money out of the bank,
and traded it away for real money," Ned Coker, of Icelandic company CCP
which runs Eve, told the Reuters news agency.
Eve Online has about 300,000 players all of whom inhabit the same online
universe. The game revolves around trade, mining asteroids and the
efforts of different player-controlled corporations to take control of
swathes of virtual space.
It has now emerged that Ricdic used the cash to put down a deposit on a
house and to pay medical bills.
"I'm not proud of it at all, that's why I didn't brag about it," Ricdic
told Reuters. "But you know, if I had to do it again, I probably
would've chosen the same path based on the same situation."
Ricdic has now been thrown out of the game as trading in-game cash for
real money is against Eve Online's terms and conditions.
The rules governing play within Eve would not have sanctioned Ricdic if
he had simply stolen the cash and used it in the game, nor if he had
bought kredits with real dollars.
The scandal is not the first to play out in Eve Online. In early 2009
one of the game's biggest corporations, called Band of Brothers, was
brought down by industrial espionage.
Source: BBC/Reuters
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