THE REAL DEAL ON RMTFollow

Here's a post from a thread I saw on another server. Just thought you guys might find this interesting.

Boy this is gonna be a fun one, July/August 2005 Issue of Computer Gaming World has a nice 3 page artical on RMT. So without farther ado...

"Last month we showed you some of thescammers and crooks that lurk in MMO games. Now, lets go into the field for a firsthand account of another part of the online underworld.

"Sack" is the only name I'm given for the person I'm supposed to contact. He lives in the Fujian province of China, but his place of business is online--he plays Lineage II. He's paid about 56 cents an hour to workin a videogame "sweatshop."

If the term sounds familiar, it's because of Lee Caldwell. The notorious MMORPG scripter got busted four years agofor addimtting that his company, BlackSnow, hired workers in Tijuana to earn gold by "farming" in Ultima Online. Caldwell sold that in-game tender online for a handsome real-world profit while only paying his employees pennies on the dollar. Since 1998, the second-party market for MMORPG loot has steadily grown. Last year alone, this newfound industry grossed roughly $500 million, according to Bob Kiblinger of UOTreasures. CGW decided it was high time to go underground and find some of the key players who going after a piece of the action.

Sack is the low man in these operations. "I work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on the U.S. Lineage II server," he says. He works long, boring hours for low payand gets no holidays. Carefully construsted macros do most of the work; Sack is just there to fend off the occasional player itching for a fight or game master who's hunting for these automated farming programs.

"Everyone knows where the good places are, and GMs know that your account has been online for a whole month," he says. "[A GM will] message me asking, 'Hello, what level are you, please?' I know he isn't asking my level; he just wants to know if [there;s actually a person at the computer]."

How does it work? The macros for World of Warcraft, for example, comtrol a high-level hunter and cleric. The hunter kills while the cleric automatically heals. Once they are fully loadedwith gold and items, the "farmer" who's monitoring their progress manually controls them out of the dungeon to go sell their goods. These automated agents are then returnedto the dungeons to do their thing again. Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while walks away with a measly $150.

MACROS AND EXPLOITERS

The real money is made by the people with the resources and the right programs. Rich Thurman earned $100,000 by farming 9 billion gold in Ultima Online. A longtime userof the macro easyUO, Thurman sayshe had "up to 30 PCs running at once, automatically collecting gold for me."

That is the first step. It isn't too difficult from there to make the leap into creating your own sweatshop. All you need is the ability to write game macros or the money to purchase them. That's right, if you know where to look, they are on the open market. A macro that uses a teleportation exploit in WOW is currently going for $3,000. Then just hire cheap labor to monitor the bots.

Weeks go by as I chase ghosts and rumors of Chinese workers clicking 12 hours a day. Word has it that 300 farmers are working at computer lined up in airport hangers somewhere in Asia. After all, Lineage II banned certain Chinese IPs for a reason. Finally, I get in contact with a man in his 30s who goes by the name Smooth Criminal. He's a partner in one of the largest sellers of MMORPG gold, and isn't apologetic. His rap sheet: banned from Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Shadowbane, Star Wars Galaxies, and Ultima Online again. He says once someone even traded a wedding ring worth $2,000 WOW gold.

Smooth Criminal's game cartel made $1.5 million from Star Wars Galaxies alone last year, and individually, he's made as much as $700,000 in a single year. "[SWG] built my new house, which I paid for in cash," he says. "So when you ring my doorbell, it plays the Star Wars music." Smooth Criminal is in chargeof writing programs, finding exploits, and locating in-game "dupes" (bugs for duplicating gold or items). "I have a real job, but when there's a dupe, I call in sick," he says. It costs him more money to actually go to his "real job." "When I dupe," Smooth Criminal adds, "I farm billions on every game server and spread out my activities." He then uses three accounts to launder the gold: a duper account, a filter account, and a delivery account--each created using different IPs, credit cards, and computers. This way, it's hard to trace the source, and the gold comes back clean.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

For every reseller of gold, there's a wholesaler who supplies it to the gamers with real money to burn. And the biggest name in the gold resale is IG^E, or Internet Gaming Entertainment. "It's not that they pay the best; they are the most well known, and so [stuff] sells fast," says Smooth Criminal. He knows sales are good because resellers can track profits in real time--and because IG^E is one of the biggest fish in the secondary gold market. In fact, IG^E has been on a buying spree. It is acquiring the competition and creating a virtual monopoly in this market.

IG^E president Steve Salyer tells CGW, "We don't farm assets, nor do we endorse and type of cheating or abusive farming practices. IG^E is leading the way in efforts to help prevent these abuses. We spend a lot of time speaking with the sellers and educating people involved in the secondary market. IG^E is against abusive farming practices whereever they are taking place."

But finding and shutting down these farming sweatshops is a hard thing to do. Kiblinger says that IG^E's customer service is based in Hong Kong, its employees working for sweatshop wages. IG^E's response: "The reason we have customer service in Hong Kongis because it's the gateway to Asia, and ours customer service reps earn a fair salary in relation to the profession in that country." This is the rationale for major companies shipping their customer service desks to India.

Even though IG^E itself doesn't farm, and IG^E representatives recently told us the company is working to ferret out and ban such bahavior, its does buy from farmers who could use exploits. "Whoever supplies IG^E controls the market," says Smooth Criminal. Even worse, he continues, "IG^E looks the other way when you give them currency. They don't care where it came even if you tell them you dupe it." In fact, Smooth Criminal alleges that IG^E helped him hide the illegel credits. "They had to keep moving [Star War Galaxies] credits around from account to account to avoid the credit trail (i.e., duped credits) because we told them they were duped." (We asked an IG^E representative about Smooth Criminal's experience and recieved no response.) Currently, Chinese farmers are the main suppliers of WOW's in-game items and gold, and they control the market. Does this mean IG^E needs to buy from these suppliers to stay competitive?

Smooth Criminal owns 30% of an Indonesian farm, and he just bought a Chinese one that was entirely funded by a recent WOW exploit. When he doesn't have a currency exploit, he falls back on his shops to do some wholesale farming. "Farmer in WOW will be stationed on a 20-gold-per-hour spot. They have to make at least 15 gold per hour," says Smooth Criminal. However, he has only 10 computers in place so far.

"Ten computers? We have 100 employees for one game!" laughs "Sell". Sell is a recent graduate from Nanjing University. At 24, he's a manager for Vpgamesell, a large SWG Chinese farming center that wholesales to popular resellers. He started off be selling gil in Final Fantasy XI, but his farming days are over. He's moved up to manager status, helping with marketing and delivery. His many farmerwork 10-hour rotations and are paid $121 a month. Sell gets $180 a month and works closer to 14 hours a day because he lives at the office, which is a fairly common practice at farming center--if you lose your job, you also lose your home. Sell negotiates with resellers online to determine the amount of credits they promise to purchase from Vpgamesell. While chatting with me, he's messageing five different people and making contracts for 5 million credits for each server per day.

"HeRog," the owner of Your Virtual Seller, does the same thing as Sell but gets paid well here in America. "I was able to quit my full-time, six-figure-income job," HeRog says.

Smooth Criminal tells me the hiring process at his Indonesian farm is through word of mouth , and the farm turns down 10 to 20 people a day. But that process can get difficult, especially in poor countries.

Adrian2001, a manager for Gamer's Loot, says of his hiring process, "Trust is the most important." He gives an example: "I have one boy here [in Romania] that raises goats. So imagine someone who has never seen a PC in his life. I hired the boy because his family is very poor, and he is honest. I tested him by putting money where he might notice it. The money never moved from the spot. I do that with everyone I hire."

For all the so-called virtual sweatshops discovered, a lot of these young men and boys don't mind their jobs, and they aren't exactly working in sweatshop conditions. There's a world of difference between making sneakers and watching bots fight all day. However, they are underpaid, or as Smooth Criminal puts it, "They get paid dirt. But dirt is good where they live."-James Lee

Just thought some of you may find this to be a good read. Discuss , tear it apart, have at it. Interest on how these things are run. I'm gonna try and locate last month article to see what that says about this.

Very good read, rate up. lol

When I read this I think of the Matrix, where Neo trades the disk to the punker group for a decent chunk of change...
Its pretty scary that stuff like this goes on in the background of every day life.. You know, Shady program trading... Underground hacking circles... Electronic mafia stuff.

*They're watching you right now*



Ok maybe not, but it kinda gave you a little tingle, no? ^_-


Thanks for posting something interesting, that hopefully, won't turn into a flame war. lol ~Aet