Scamming - Threatening - Blackmail
Good morning Ladies and Gentleman,
since in the last few days (an i guess the history is long here) there have been rather interesting scenarios ..
1. > Scamsite harvesting Accounts and stole items / tokens
2. > Blackmailing to get an Amount of ingame Currency
3. > Trades in which Players left with the loss of items
and so on ...
i was wondering, how i would react and what could i do.
as i am from good old germany, there is no way to sue someone for a robbery if the robbed item is not
a real item. "bewegliche sache". which means kind of movable good. so there must be another way to
have the thief responsible and it is the §303a, Datenveraenderung. This means basically the criminal
offense of unauthorized change, deletion or the supressing of data without agreement.
this has been in court in Augsburg (near Munich) for example in 2010.
since the sentence is up to 2 yrs in prison, for §303a. If the "virtual item" is gone by a scam, the
§263 / 263a would be "computer scam" and get get you in prison for 5 yrs.
In the Netherlands, in 2007 two boys were sentenced because they "robbed" virtual items for an
onlinegame by force (they beat him up). the court ruled, it does not matter if the item is virtual or
not, this is a criminal offense and the virtual amulet was worth like a real one to the owner.
the sentence was up to 200 hrs of charitable work btw.
i found this interesting since a lot of us paid in hours of farming for items or paying with real money
for plat to buy this or that.
are there laws in other countries similar to these?
