Currency $candal Rocks EVE Online

VirtualWorlds.com reports :

Sci-fi MMORPG EVE Online’s world full of player-run banks and corporations got one of its first tastes of virtual white-collar crime. The top executive of the player-run EVE financial institution Ebank, intended as an in-world business that would let other players safely deposit and borrow amounts of in-game virtual currency ISK, embezzled a substantial but unknown sum of ISK deposited by other players. The executive, who went by the online handle Ricdic, sold the embezzled virtual currency to a third-party grey market RMT service in exchange for real-world cash.

Before the embezzling scandal hit, Ebank was known to have approximately 8.9 trillion ISK in deposited in 13,000 accounts belonging to 6,000 other players. While Ricdic has since had his account terminated by EVE Online’s developer CCP, a run on the bank by depositors resulted in the withdrawal of 5.5 trillion ISK. Ebank has since temporarily shut down to sort out the mess and try to figure out exactly how much of the remaining 4.9 trillion ISK was embezzled and how much was part of outstanding loans made by the bank. Rumors indicate Ricdic may have embezzled roughly 10% of the bank’s total deposited funds, or about 890 billion ISK. [...]

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~ by Alexandra on June 15, 2009.