Fraud (was: Re: [MUD-Dev] UO rants)

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

I'm horribly behind on messages after having a rather busy weekend. 
But, this comment demanded a response.

John Buehler wrote:
 
> I was referring to effective banning.  Eventually, a player will run out of
> real life identities that they can borrow.  Kids can use each of their
> parents, maybe other relatives and friends' parents, but it's a limited set.

No, they won't.  I have constantly made up names for those pages that
require registration in order to get into certain parts of a WWW site. 
My favorite pseudonym is "Patricia Childs" (it comes from my old college
username, pchild).  The "problem" is not game anonymity, but Internet
anonymity.  And, there are a *lot* of people with a vested interest in
keeping the Internet anonymous.

Oh, and IP banning generally doesn't work.  They'll just log out and
call up their dial-in ISP again.  Unless you want to ban all of aol.com,
IP banning won't work in the long run.

> Far more limited than the number of credit cards that anyone can obtain.

And here's the seedy underside of the commercial industry: credit card
fraud.  I've heard various figures, but it's not low.  Some people will
stop at nothing to get back into your game.  If they are willing to rip
off mom or dad's credit card, what makes you think they won't try to
enter random numbers until they hit the lottery?  Or, that they won't go
to some 1337 warez site and find the latest "cracked" credit card
database.  Or memorize the credit card info from the guy that just paid
for a meal at the restaurant they work at?

I know most people will say, "But, that's illegal!"  It is, but consider
a few things.  Most of these people are minors.  It's time consuming to
bring criminal cases against them.  Also, it's just frankly not worth
the effort.  I remember we had a person harassing players, and probably
costing us new customers.  He'd log onto the "free" guest area and
verbally abuse volunteers and anyone that got within earshot of him in
the game.  We tried several times to handle him, we even filed criminal
charges against him.  Turns out this man was already a wanted person,
had a string of warrants out for his arrest.  He was a very slippery
character and just frustrated us to no end.  We never did get the papers
served, as far as I know.

In short, it's all been done before with very minimal success.

--
"And I now wait / to shake the hand of fate...."  -"Defender", Manowar
     Brian Green, brian at psychochild.org  aka  Psychochild
       |\      _,,,---,,_      *=* Morpheus, my kitten, says "Hi!" *=*
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   "They're not bugs, they're 'place-
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'    holders for code that works.'"
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)         - Andrew Kirmse, Meridian 59 creator



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