Many Final Fantasy XI players are aware of a rash of account hackings that occurred over the past couple of months. A number of players saw their account passwords suddenly changed after their gaming computers were compromised. Square Enix has been unable to help most of these players, who saw hours of game-work disappear when their characters were stolen.

One 20-year-old has taken it upon himself to seek justice with his local police department, reports a Minnesota newspaper. Geoff Luurs reported the crime, in which 75 million Gil worth of virtual items and coin that belonged to his character were stolen. Although Square Enix prohibits players from participating in real-money trade (RMT) between game items and real currency, the gil is worth about $4,000 U.S. on the FFXI “black market”.

The police, however, refuse to investigate the event. According to them, virtual items have no monetary value whatsoever and no crime has taken place. The response angered law professor Joshua Fairfield of Washington and Lee University:

“What happened here is somebody stole almost USD 4000 and got away cold. This is just a matter of zeros. The first time IBM loses USD 10 million, we’re going to see some police action. The argument that a magic sword isn’t real, that doesn’t make sense to me. You can ask the question, why would somebody buy that? But you can’t say it’s not worth real money.”

Putting aside the fact that swords in Final Fantasy XI aren’t normally magic, Fairfield brings up a good point. Despite the fact that it’s against the rules, RMT is a common thing in FFXI as well as in most other MMO games, some of which allow and even participate in the trade of virtual items for real-world money.

Recent hackings involved exploits on some Final Fantasy XI information sites that were finding back-door entries into players’ computers, but in the case of this player, it’s also suspected that he gave out his information at some point. Luurs named another FFXI player as a former friend and current suspect, raising the question of whether or not he actually gave out his password in the past. This is a somewhat common practice, although it’s also forbidden by Square Enix due to security risks.

So what’s your take? Is this a case of the law being behind the times, or is this FFXI player crying over spilled milk? Having spent hours in Final Fantasy XI myself, I can certainly respect the amount of time and energy it takes to build up a character — there’s certainly a value to what was stolen, even if it’s hard to quantify.

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