Gamers say NCsoft slow in reacting to ID theft

A day after the revelation that private information of several hundred people was stolen and used by others to sign up for the popular online game Lineage, over 2,000 reports of such thefts had been made by yesterday morning. The Cyber Terror Response Center of the National Police said yesterday it would investigate the case, although the game developer and operator NCsoft Corp. has yet to ask the police to intervene. The center said it would trace the Internet address of gamers using other people’s private information. The operator of Lineage and its follow-up Lineage 2, NCsoft said in a statement yesterday that the use of strangers’ names and resident identification numbers used to play the game was possible only because other Web sites, less secure than its own, had been cracked open and the necessary data obtained there. The company also assured victims of the identity theft that there were no financial consequences to them just because their names and ID numbers were being used to play the game. That didn’t satisfy many Internet gamers. They are criticizing the company for what they say are misguided measures it took to remove the fraudulent game accounts. The company would delete those accounts, it said, only if identity-theft victims sent a copy of their resident ID cards by fax or e-mail to the company. Those whose identities were stolen complain that they do not want to provide their private information to delete those bogus accounts. But somewhat puzzlingly, they also complained that NCsoft would in fact delete those accounts if people called the company’s service line and gave a representative the issue date of their national ID. They said the company was not publicizing that procedure out of a fear of being swamped by phone calls. Experts said the biggest contributor to the quest for genuine ID numbers for use in the game is that players can trade game tokens for cash. Those tokens can be used to “arm” a user online ― about 20 million tokens would be required to get a full set of weapons and armor. Private entrepreneurs are selling one million tokens for about 15,000 to 20,000 won ($15-20). That has inspired a boom in “Lineage factories” in China and Korea, where computer centers of up to 1,000 PCs each are manned by players fishing for tokens that can be resold. In Korea, honest game players can sign up only once, because their resident ID must be provided when they register. The black market in tokens, the national police said, was about 1 trillion won last year, 90 percent of it probably generated in China. Nicknames on the accounts also suggest Chinese origins for many of the accounts. by Seo Ji-eun, Kim Chang-woo