Dutch teen swipes furniture from virtual hotel

WHAT ! ! ! !

u gotta be taking the pi$$ . . . how can u steal virtual furniture... when is is not a physical asset and the 'owners' have copies of the item in question.

lol anyways, if his room was in the virtual hotel, surely its merely relocating furniture instead ??

the mind boggles !

Beware dutch coders!

HACKING IS NOW A CRIME!

Now, unlawful entry into a computer system is one thing, but hacking can mean coding, writing the kind of journalism the reg is famed for or chopping up a log with a large axe.

Someone should educate them before they continue to make these kinds of retarded errors.

hrm...

I trust this means that the Dutch police have managed to solve all the other crimes in Holland?

I hope someone high up in their police force gets wind of this and heads roll. It's like when random celebs get curfews or house arrest or whatever it's called and then you see about 12 officers on the front page of the Sun going 'round to check that said celeb perp is honouring their agreement - rather than actually going and fighting crimes committed by dangerous people...

Coma

I laughed myself into a coma after writing this.

Key point here...

Habbo hotel is aimed at teenagers. The fact that (a) habbo credit can be purchased "simply" by ringing a premium-rate phone number and (b) their target market generally has easy access to a telephone line for which they don't have to pay means that, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter how much these things cost. Mum and Dad's money is essentially "virtual" anyway, and it can be weeks before the phone bill hits the mat and the dungheap hits the windfarm...

I speak with some experience; our children went through a phase of near-addiction to this hideous phenomenon. Thing is, Habbo are sneaky fuckers, and you can forget about gettting your money back if your own kids have been roped into stealing it from you (which is what this amounts to) and the "community" is rife with would-be scammers and haxx0r5 who'll rip off any noob who's stupid enough to fall for their tricks. This little dutch boy seems to be the one that got caught, frankly.

On the one hand, it's probably helped our kids to become a little more savvy as a result. On the other hand, the scammers just keep getting more sophisticated. In terms of learning a valuable lesson... Well, expensive isn't the same as valuable, is it? Especially when someone else is footing the bill... I'm delighted to report that the "habbo" phase seems to have dwindled away. The bad news is that my digital camera is now choc-full of pictures of our pubescent daughters making "winsome" and pointing at their own mouths in a way that would make a pederast pitch. Hail bebo!

makes no sense?

surely the stolen furniture would just have been deleted from the guys account and put back where it belongs... I mean, they do take backups, right? What a waste of police time.

@Peter Darby

Of course you can steal his software if you want. He paid for the license to use it, not the software itself.

They'll have to...

...serve him with a Hasbbo.

Hmmm

Think I best check my account, just incase....

I'm with Cameron

If this is a real report then I am worried as I have numerous counts of virtual murder, GBH and if you take my star wars "empire at war" use of the death star. then I can add genocide to the list.

And losing make believe stuff in a game happens all the time. Just ask EA at how bad they code their games that people "Buy" then after server upgrades in their many bug fix release, people have "lost." Can we expect them to press charges for that?

...this world has gone crazy.

Reality Check... doh!

I was about to say that the police need a reality check, before I changed my mind. They need a virtual rality check... if it is virual theft, should the police not be virtually arresting?

I agree with a lost of the postings prior, these people need to get out more. If they don't go blind they will at least get short-sighted from all that computer screen time.

BTW has anybody though of launching a virtual reality on computers inside second life? You could call it "third life", "half life", or maybe, "for god's sake GET A LIFE". No wonder people are losing their social skills...

Whats next ...

... virtual murder when you delete a habbo?

... virtual euthanisia when you delete your own account?

Oh my god...

So let me get this right, people are willing to hand over cash, (well sometimes parents unknowingly have to hand it over I gather), to buy virtual furniture in a virtual hotel room??

What do they do with it?

Mayhap i am too old for all of this but I fail to see how even children could get excited by this?

Oh and yes i agree that the police should be focusing more of their time on real crime that happens in real life...

I dont think most of you commentors visited the Habbo website?

It's not what I expected. It's definitely aimed at kids and I can understand how kids could like it, and lets face it most of us spent our weekly allowance on baseball cards, garbage pail kids, pogs, hey---remember MUSCLE MEN, those little rubber monsters figures?? Basically pointless fun stuff. This Habbo site allows you to buy game-cards at retail places like Target and CVS pharmacies and then use them to do cheesey kid stuff to your virtual toy.

Anyway... Back to the article... It's ultimately a case of compromising a commercial computer system illegally. Sure its stealing virtual toys and not exactly a murderous crime---I'd say its akin to shoplifting as a kid, and just as I got caught stealing as a kid he rightfully deserves a slap on the wrist....Before he starts thinking its also ok to steal credit card info.

Am i right?

MMORPG

Six year olds are doing this massively multiplayer online role-playing game stuff in the UK/USA.

Using cartoon penguin avatars completing simple games and tasks (and paying a small monthly fee to access the furniture) the online community goes and hangs-out in whichever penguine avatar has built up the most bejewelled collection of virtual bling or TV sets. It is then possible, I think, to have a limited chat session with your MMORPG penguin buddies. All sorts of UK law enforcement issues come to mind, I hope the UK SOCA enjoy pretending to be a 6yr old penguin to catch the presumably evil ones!

oh , I almost forgot the URI <clubpenguin.com>

Rich, et al

Just poking away at this idea that "bit & bytes = inherently worthless". Doesn't matter how they're stored, but implying it's not a crime because the code is somehow "frivolous" compared to other code is a bit shaky.

As goes virtual furniture... as my good friend said of Paris Hilton, at least I've never paid for it...

Personally, I'm with the folks who are saying Habbo should have sorted this out (and with decent audit trails, it would be a portion of urine). Getting the law involved leads to a rocky road, at the end of which is being taxed on virtual income...

Virtual security...

If you left your house unlocked, you'd be considered "to blame" if someone walked in and stole your stuff.

If you secured your house with a padlock that cost 50P from the market, and almost counts as a 1 lever lock, despite being made out of tin, and someone snapped it off and stole your stuff, you'd be considered to have "not taken due care".

If your 7 lever 'break safe' lock was left intact in the steel framed door, when someone used a grinder to cut the bricks out around the door, you'd be considered a really unlucky victim of a very determined criminal, and your contents insurance should cover the loss, if your alarm was set.

If your username is "r2d2" and your password is "starwars", and someone found out your password and changed the ownership field on some rows in a database, you'd be considered a victim of those devious evil hackers, not the idiot that you are.

p.s. Can you get Virtual Contents Insurance yet?

hmm

be interesting to see if this stands up in court!

of course he's goin' down!

Its a win-win-win situation - politicians get an easy "cybercrime is real - you had better be afraid" headline, the police get a an easy conviction for their stats and the virtual furniture makers and all other "intellectual property" owners get a public confirmation that the full force of the law will be used against those who don't support their rather dubious business model.

Who the losers are is left as an exercise to the reader.

Title

I wouldn't even check in to a virtual hotel unless it was the Paris Hilton.

I know, I'm gone already.

No Need to Hack

I found that my son (Bless him) had spent £90.00 on a Premium rate phone line to top up his Habbo account. I did have a little chat with him about the rights and wrongs of using the telephone for such frivolous matters (and then promptly barred access to Habbo on the firewall and locked the telephone handset away when not in the house!).

He then had the little problem of having all his stuff stolen. You see this other Habbo user chatting with him asked him if he would like a load of free furniture and other things. Understandably my son jumped at the chance, all he had to do was give his "Friend" his username and password, his "Friend" would log-in to my sons account and add all these things for him.............

Now, one good thing did come of the fleecing, the "Friend" stole all the stuff from my Son but after doing so he also deleted my Son's'* (*delete as applicable) account. :-)

@Peter Redding

"Also, the guy should have taken a virtual dump in the bath after stealing the furniture."

funniest thing i've heard all day! :-D

Scary

Whilst this is stupidly hilarious, the implications are out of this world. With arrests in the real world for virtual crimes (anyone see Ch5's undercover reporter in Second Life after the paedophile cartels?) becoming more apparent, clearly people are failing to distinguish reality from virtuality. Furthermore this becons the question; are our leaders assigning value to things that don't actually exist?

HOW?????

has he managed to fit all the furniture in his room or house or whatever????

don't tell me that he's hired a virtual house for his stolen virtual furniture!!!!!!

Toy story

This is basically about kid's toys, isn't it? Like little Sally pinching stuff from little Britney's dolls house? If the police were called every time that happened ...

Actually, in 1959 Colin Smith nicked my Dinky. I'm off to call the plod's cold case department.

where's the anti-US angle?

surely there's some sort of anti-American, anti-DHS, or anti-Bush angle here...or are you saying stupid totalitarianism exists elsewhere in the world? *gasp* shocking!

I can understand getting the kid on a "hacking" charge-maybe a few months community service, or on the hard side, 30 days in The Cooler. But for these dweebs to drop in some game-designated value and hit the punk as if it were a real world monetary amount-ridiculous. That'd be practically grand-theft time.

Lawmakers world wide need to pull their heads out. Content providers need a cranial enema. Stealing a real person's ID:BAD. Copying a song or moving a "virtual" item: NOT BAD. because the virtual item can be restored the same as if there was a backup issue or accidental deletion.

Though this does set a "service level" precedent. If someone can go to jail based on an arbitrary value of virtual goods, then the game provider must also be held accountable-meaning, if they 'accidentally' delete some accounts (eBay anyone?) then the company or the administrator in charge is then responsible for the amount of value of all accounts. With this logic, deleting a few 'virtual rooms" would be the legal equivalent of taking a person's car and dropping it into the grinder. Without permission. Maybe then eBay, Google, etc. would be less enthusiastic about their data domination plans if there was also a potential downside.

There is only one thing to say

THE

POOL

HAS

BEEN

CLOSED!

DUE TO AIDS!

As an aside he probably got a list off of rapid shit.

Also it's basically a place 10 year olds go to cyber and stand there going "GAI LUKIN 4 GF!" and other such shit, have you ever been to ragnarock or the free servers in runescape or gaia or any of that crap? They're full of teens and preteens offering sexual favours and asking people to fucking marry them.

They all have aids and must be cleansed! Under 18s should just be banned from the internet.

Things that don't exist

>> Furthermore this becons the question; are our leaders assigning value to things that don't actually exist?

"begs" the question.

How many lives^H^H^H^H^Htrillions of dollars would you assign to non-existent WMDs? Or bringing "Democracy" to far-away lands? Then there are people who are writing whole books concerning Free Will.

How rude !

How rude !

Now the appropriate punishment for this crime would be to bar them access to any computing device for the next twenty years thus keeping them away from any virtual world period !

Now what would Paris say in a situation like this ?