World of Warcraft

Also known as: WoW

Videogame crime report, 2007

So much game-related crime, and GTA4 isn't even out yet

Words: David Houghton, GamesRadar UK

Date: 26th June, 2007

Location: Adelaide, Australia/North Carolina, USA

Crime: Attempted abuduction

Details: A thirty-one year old Austrailian woman tries to take a seventeen year old American boy back home for marriage. They met in World Of Warcraft. Oh dear.

You’re not helping WoW players fight the geeky social deviant sterotype missy. Not one little bit.

After forging an “intense” romantic relationship through the MMO with the boy when he was sixteen, Tamara Broome then flew over to the US with the intention of meeting him and taking him back to Australia to get married. Bizarrely, her plan failed. What are the chances?

According to Ms. Broome’s flatmate, the boy consented to travel to the other side of the world to shack up with his significantly higher-levelled online paramour. She also stated that she’d been told that the boy’s parents were paying for Broome’s flight to the US in order to “sort it all out”. Two problems though.

Firstly, being aged seventeen made the boy an under-age minor by North Carolina law, thus potentially swiping Ms. Broome hard in the face with the paedo-stick if things had gone any further. Secondly, by “sort it all out”, it seems the boys parents may have meant “get your ass soundly arrested”. She was met by three detectives near the boy’s house and found herself behind bars soon afterwards, claiming the whole thing was a set up.

Broome was later sent back to Australia after having her charge reduced to ‘contributing to the delinquency of a minor’. If she contacts the boy before his eighteenth birthday she will be arrested again. After that though, the raid can theoretically continue.

 
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