“My wife is a stay at home mom that would like to make some extra cash. Most work from home jobs are a scam so I thought to myself, why not teach her how to glide and we can just sell gold or accounts for extra money.” This is just one of countless posts made on one very popular videogame cheating forum found on the internet. Basically, this fine upstanding gentleman would like his wife to use her time productively by finding a part-time job. Wary of the many get rich quick scams readily available to the masses, he opts for an easy way to make a little money by teaching his wife to cheat at a popular online videogame and make very high-level characters and in-game gold to sell to interested and… erm, impatient players for real money.

“Wait a second…” you might be saying to yourself, “you can actually make money by playing videogames in your free time? And it isn’t a scam?!” Actually, you can… but don’t think you’re safe just yet. This type of “job” is actually very much illegal and videogame companies are going to great length to track down these frauds and prevent this type of activity from persisting. Consequences may range anywhere from a permanent ban on your game account to jail time, and with good reason. Not only does this sort of exploitation ruin a perfectly fair game for most players, but the excess of ill-gotten gold can ruin the in-game economy. There have even been cases of would-be scammers being scammed out of valuable characters and even currency, both in-game and in real life. Though this battle against in-game exploitation has been going on for as long as games themselves have been running, it has recently become a popular topic of conversation in the media. CNN.com recently covered a book released in July of this year titled Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems written by software security experts Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw. Though the book has already drawn numbers of savvy gamers, hackers-in-training, and casual tech enthusiasts to its pages, exposure on the widely read news site has increased its fame immeasurably. The word is finally out to the general public about cheating, and more importantly, how and why it should be stopped.