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Recommended Reads: Phishing at Habbo leads to arrest

"Immediately, there was a scamming problem with the users. The naming convention for furniture allowed for a trick where a user with a name like "100x" could convince other users that he was trading 100 units of furniture." (Sulka Haro, Sulake)

Yesterday this news was all over the web, after BBC broke news about cases of virtual theft at Habbo Hotel. Dutch teenagers have been arrested and questioned by the police for stealing 4.000 EUR worth of virtual furniture (and then allegedly moving them to their own Habbo rooms, duh):

“A Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing virtual furniture from “rooms” in Habbo Hotel, a 3D social networking website… A spokesman for Sulake, the company that operates Habbo Hotel, said: “The accused lured victims into handing over their Habbo passwords by creating fake Habbo websites.”

Phishing scams are not a new phenomenon at Habbo, they date back to the times when Habbo was still “Hotelli Kulta Kala”, as Sulka Haro, lead designer for Habbo at Sulake explains:

“Immediately, there was a scamming problem with the users. The naming convention for furniture allowed for a trick where a user with a name like “100x” could convince other users that he was trading 100 units of furniture.”

Outstanding was the involvement of the police this time, which was the first time ever the Duch police took legal action against someone on suspicion of virtual theft (as expatica.com reports):

“It is the first time ever the Dutch police arrested someone on suspicion of having committed a virtual burglary. Apart from the 17-year-old suspect, the police also interrogated four 15-year-old teenagers about the affair. According to a police spokesman, the suspects will be charged on two accounts: hacking and burglary. ”

It seems to be a bit weird to roll out the guns for this case, since phishing is such a widespread and seriously problematic issue in virtual worlds, with a lot of more drastic incidents being reported before. Maybe the Dutch police acts according to the motto “better late than never”.

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