Date: 17^th July, 2007

Location:Brazil

Crime: Videogame account theft with a deadly weapon

Details: The world’s top GunBound player has his account details stolen. At GunPoint.

The world of online gaming is becoming a dangerous place. If it isn’t gold-farming children strapped to keyboards in eastern warehouses, vicious verbal attacks over Xbox Live, or being fragged by a baby, it’s online politics manifesting its ugly, sunlight-deprived face in the real world. Usually this sort of thing results in some verbal or physical jostling with a rival, but when there’s money to be made, things can get downright dangerous  (while admittedly being quite funny in a really wrong way).

Some people will pay a lot of money for a successful game account. Don’t ask us why, but certain gamers will happily fork out a couple of thousand dollars in order to pretend they’re good at a game rather than actually playing it enough to get good. You know, the fun part.

As a result, by this summer a Brazilian gang known as ‘La Firma’ had made twenty-three attempts to spirit away the account belonging to the world’s top-scoring GunBound player. Having earned only a tally of twenty-three failures for their troubles, they changed tactic in July. Working from the scurrillous, clearly baseless assumption that the best bait for a hardcore online player would be the prospect of getting laid, they set up a fake date in order to lure him out of the house. Upon arriving though, rather than finding a sexy lady-creature, he found a far less sexy man with a gun, who forced him into the nearest internet café and made him transfer the account.

The account was advertised on sale for $8000, presumably a bargain to those unaware of the fact that having such a high score and still playing like a noob would be a tad conspicuous. Police later caught and handed out a legal pwning to several members of the gang.