Interview: The Science Of MMO Fraud

[This is an interesting, if odd one - Mathew Kumar talked to Gene Hoffman, CEO of billing and fraud management company Vindicia, about the issues MMO publishers such as Blizzard (which we believe Vindicia represented, but they didn’t explicitly confirm) face - and what they can do to avoid fraud, which can be massive.]
As MMOGs increase in size and become more like real economies, fraud, either in-world theft or simple credit card chargebacks, become a larger issue.
In fact, chargebacks are a relatively little-known but fascinating part of the MMO world. As recently explained, fraudulent chargeback “…occurs when a credit card transaction is refuted by the cardholder.”, and can occur both with stolen credit cards and even when “…the actual cardholder makes the transaction and then decides to refute the transaction after the fact.”
For major MMO firms, these fees can stretch into millions of dollars every month, making […]

Original post by editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless) and software by Elliott Back