Nicholas Patterson's Page

If you are familiar with avatars and virtual worlds, black market industries, virtual crime or have had any property stolen before. Then my research will be of much interest to you!

When it comes to virtual worlds you don’t come to watch a movie, or attend a concert, or even, really, to hang out with friends. You come to virtual worlds because you’re ready to have your worldview challenged!
Forget about a movie where you relate to and are moved by the characters and story. Imagine, there is no plot line, you ARE the character, and you’re about to be more engaged than you believed ever possible.
You might run a business, explore the environment, be shaken, enriched, scared, or enlightened. But you’ll be hard-pressed to emerge unchanged.

Then imagine it all comes to a crashing halt. One day you come home from work, turn on your computer and jump head first into the virtual world, only to see all your goods and property have been stolen! All that time and effort spent gathering this property has been destroyed in one fowl swoop! Virtual goods in these worlds is quite diverse it can range from anything to a pair of Reebok shoes to virtual currency to even a battle axe.

The key to my topic is that virtual property can be sold on the black market for substantial profit through a process called real money trading. Many criminal organizations such as the Chinese mafia and Korean computerized sweatshops are taking advantage of this and reaping huge rewards at the expense of legitimate players.

The good news is; we can develop technologies to stop this problem from occurring as dramatically as it has been. The bad news is that operators of these virtual worlds are not a great deal of help and real world law is only coming to grips with the theory of virtual property having real value. So therefore millions of individuals will have their property stolen and to be never seen again.

The question my research is investigating is how virtual property is being stolen so easily by these criminals and as a result how can we dramatically reduce if not completely abolish this problem from occurring as much as has been.

One of the key issues is that most ‘Real Money Trades’ (RMTs) are conducted in a black market not sanctioned by the virtual world operators. RMT actually exceeds US$5 billion per annum. There’s a multitude of ways for virtual goods to be converted to real money, bound only by the imagination of the criminal mind. Clearly, the opportunities for money laundering are becoming quite severe and need to be dealt with.

The findings discovered in my research will allow us to create ways to dramatically reduce if not abolish the occurrence of virtual property theft from ever occurring in the future; and allow avatars to enjoy their experience.

The distinct difference to my solution is it’s not a matter of just putting a roadblock in place. A roadblock will stop the problem for a short time, but criminals will find ways around, over or under the wall eventually. My solution involves putting in place a mechanism which will actively and intelligently detect virtual property thieves in the process of virtual property theft and as a result halt their activities completely.

I will explain it in real world terms you can understand more easily. Imagine having cctv on every street corner of every city in world having that footage intelligently monitored 24/7 and essentially once detection of theft has taken place, instantly the police are there to cease and arrest the criminal before they can achieve theft.

This will ultimately cut down the black market industry and slave labour camps from making tax free profit and as a result hopefully stop criminals from causing disturbance to these virtual worlds and the avatars which inhibit them.