ENISA Report on online Gaming Fraud

ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Agency has released a report into online gaming fraud, and the protection of private data and other related issues.

Second Life figures prominently throughout the report, and the Agency provides a number of recommendations to the European Commission and National Governments.

The report can be accessed here:

http://www.enisa.europa.eu/doc/pdf/deliverables/enisa_pp_security_privacy_virtualworlds.pdf

It makes for very interesting reading (even bots are discussed).

Two of the recommendations that caught my eye was the taking away of the power of MMO/VW suppliers with regard to player-to-player dispute resolution, and putting it into independent hands;

and charging a fee (Euro50 was suggested) to initiate a dispute (refundable only in the case of success).

Some of the data collected for the report is quite old. For example, it mentions that LL were receiving 2,000 dispute resolution requests per day during 2006, when the number of concurrently active accounts at that time was only 30,000!

Several examples of inworld scams and fraud are given.

Much food for thought.

Rock

Thanks for posting and i have DL'd it to read better later but this on page 61 tickled me in the "Appendix I Classes of MMO/VWs and their security relevant features":

Player-to-player governance: SOME COURTS and in-world lawyers, private zones

Caps are my emphasis. They couldn't have been looking at SL lol

Well, LL doesn't handle player-to-player disputes, except for DMCA. Having this kind of independent dispute resolution would be great in that regard. I just don't see how it would work for MMO's like WoW and City of Heroes.

On second thought, yes I do. I'd go after those profarmers and gold/inf spammers!

This used to be the facts but if you look at the new list of types of reportable activities in the Linden Lab Abuse Report queue There is

COMMERCE-Failure to Deliver Service or product.
and
DISTURBING THE PEACE-> Unfair use of region resources.

These seem like Linden Lab has adjusted their policy on involving themselves with resident disputes.

.

Yes, you can report it, but it doesn't mean that they're going to DO anything about it. They've repeated it over and over again like a mantra that they don't get involved in player to player disputes. I think that's a CYA thing for trend tracking.

I remember seeing somewhere that it was something that LL had not decided as to whether or not use it and i think it will always err on the LL will not get involved at all as many people are still scamming others in game you only have to look at this section of the forum for cases and LL not doing anything about it. SL will always remain unfortunately a scammers paradise while LL refuses to do anything so it will be good if outside forces can be brought to bear on LL to sort these issues imo

Actually, it'd be better if LL didn't get involved, given how trigger happy LL is. I'd rather see a third party handle the disputes. Plus, it grants LL some immunity from lawsuits from whatever the outcome might be.

Why do I have images of the most trivial cases in the world being aired before the poor sot that mediates?

I found this rather interesting:


It's interesting that they'yre classifying SL as a "Civil World" in Ren Reynold's "four worlds" taxonomy... though they're extending it with "corporate worlds" as a special case, which makes some sense to me.


Does SL actually qualify? It's possible.

I'm guessing that the User Content Creation, combined with the L$ economic system that actually can be converted back to real money, makes it more of a Civil world than a Social one. To me it really does not fit neatly into any of those categories.

I should have made myself clearer I to agree that outside arbitration would be better and not a company or rules that LL decides either. I think if things continue as they are and LL continues to become known as scam capital these things may be forced on them by outside agencies as they are dealing with real scams that nets scammers real money and LL can't keep their heads in the sand for much longer

they said something in there about players 'ganking' other players....which kinda sucks if you happen to like ganking goldfarmers

There needs to be some threshold for outside arbitration, though. I mean, even though someone could get away with a lot of money in the aggregate, it would be a huge time pit for LL to dig up the documents needed to address every dispute between residents needed to adjudicate these cases. It would be a full-time job. There has to be a dollar figure threshold, or some sort of mechanism to address petty scammers that doesn't suck up too many resources.