Police have arrested a 17-year-old boy for allegedly stealing IDs and passwords from people who tried to buy his fictitious online gaming account by directing them to a fraudulent website.
The company employee in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, allegedly accessed a website to trade gaming accounts with another boy’s ID and password that he stole from a fake website last December and points worth about ¥9,000 sent to his own account.
The Metropolitan Police Department suspects he obtained money worth a total of about ¥4 million by repeating the same scheme more than 100 times between the fall of 2022 and December last year, people familiar with the investigation said.
The 17-year-old compromised other people’s accounts using their IDs and passwords and sent their money to his own account. The money was used for an online casino and other purposes after being exchanged for crypto assets.
He looked up information on the Internet about how to steal IDs and passwords by placing a computer virus on a website.
In May this year he was arrested on suspicion of installing a virus on a fraudulent website.
The practice of trading online gaming accounts is known as real money trading. Although some games ban this practice, it remains popular among players who want to gain an advantage with stronger characters and items.
