Virtual Hotel — Real Crime
November 15, 2007 | by Christopher Nickson
In what may be a first, arrests have been made in the real world for the theft of virtual furniture from a social networking site.
In something that sounds stranger than fiction, a 17 year-old Dutch teenager has been arrested and charged with stealing virtual furniture from the teen-oriented social networking site Habbo Hotel. The furniture’s owner had paid real money – around $5,500 – for the furniture.
Five other teens have also been questioned. It’s believed that they moved the stolen furniture into their own rooms in the hotel. In Habbo Hotel, users create their own characters, and can play games and buy items using credits, which they pay for with real money – which is where the crime comes in. According to reports, Habbo Hotel is played by over six million people in 30 countries.
"The accused lured victims into handing over their Habbo passwords by creating fake Habbo websites,” a spokesman for Sulake, the operators of Habbo Hotel, told the BBC. "In Habbo, as in many other virtual worlds, scamming for other people's personal information such as user names has been problematic for quite a while. We have had much of this scamming going on in many countries but this is the first case where the police have taken legal action."
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