The FBI now is raiding homes looking for World of Warcraft gold farmers. The party van showed up March 30 at an apartment shared by two University of Michigan students (building pictured), who say the feds have got the wrong suspects. The two students, neither named, say they aren’t gold farmers and don’t play World of Warcraft. “They thought we were involved in some kind of fraud,” said one. “I’m pretty sure they have the wrong people, but they took all my stuff.”
Why is the FBI interested in gold farming? Computer World posits they may be looking for terrorist connections, either with gold farming as an enterprise funding them, or believing that the virtual worlds of these MMOs is where they plan out their operations.
Paperwork says investigators think someone at the address was in on “a scheme to set up fraudulent bank accounts to buy and/or sell ‘virtual currency’ or ‘gold’ to be used in the game”. They were looking for online transaction records associated with World of Warcraft, the Chinese gold-farming website gameusd.com, eBay, PayPal and the United Services Automobile Association.
At least they didn’t shoot anybody.
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