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CNNMOney recently had a report on how in many cases your MMO 'identity' is worth more to hackers than your 'real' identity in terms of cash value).
If thats true.. then damn you fail at life..
I believe it, I don't know from personal experience, but I would assume that it is much harder to prove a stolen MMORPG identity over identity theft. One can change their IP and/or credit card info on an account, nothing too suspicious. However, credit card theft would be by far riskier not only is it against federal law in the US, credit card companies, in this case Master Card has their protection and enough money to totally own you.
No program these days show your credit card info, from the server its always last 4 digits only, so it is unlikely that the thieves have his cc info, although I would still have all that info changed asap.
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Actually, it's a pretty simple thing. I don't think the guy who snatched his account, gained access to his Credit Card number. For instance, there are programs out there that do nothing but randomly sort thru thousands of numbers and letters. Basically, all you gotta do is enter a name, in this case UNCTGTG, click a button, and it will sit there untill it finds a match on a password, or an account number.
...no... NO.
I'm not a hacker but this is so unlikely it is disturbing that you would think this. I believe that the method you are implying is called "Brute Force." To log into FFXI you don't use a name (i.e. Unctgtg), you use a 4-letter 4-number generated pin and a random password of your choosing. For a Brute Force program to be able to sift through all of those bits of information and server requests to find an existing 8 character alone would be extremely difficult and then to generate a correct password, too, is damn near impossible, without thousand upon thousands of dollars worth of hardware. Even if they could manage to pull this off, they would have to get lucky enough to stumble upon an account worth any money at all.
Then add the fact that this is an attack on SE servers and they know it... they would report it to the FBI (like what happened last summer), money loss and high risk = not possible. A keylogger hidden in a third-party FFXI-related program is the most reasonable cause.
Perhaps I'm a little naive, but I'm sure I am right for the most part.