EVE Online
I don’t play any MMO games, but every time I hear a story from the EVE Online universe I am intrigued.
EVE Online, set in humanity’s space-faring future, has 300,000 subscribers. Players can organize corporations and use underhanded tactics to lie, cheat and steal their way to ingame fortunes.
The strategy is so deep that working banks have emerged within the EVE Online universe. Banks that accept deposits, make loans and issue bonds.
In a story that highlights these troubling economic times as much as the nature of the game, an executive at one of these banks embezzled 200,000,000,000 of the game’s currency, causing panic and a run on the bank. 
He was banned from the game, but not why you may expect. The back-stabbing and criminality in this story is par for the course in this game. But when he used a black market Web site to turn the ingame currency into more than $5,000 in real life, that broke the game’s rules and caused his banishment.
The entire thing went down in the beginning of June. The perp, a 27-year old Australian man, used the money to cover his son’s medical expenses. Other than breaking the games rules, he apparently broke no real laws.
Which makes you wonder why he only stole $200 billion from the banks coffers, which represented 8 percent of its deposits. If he would have cleaned the bank out he would have raked in $58,650!
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Tags: EVE Online, MMO, video games
