Woman in jail after killing her online husband
A woman has been arrested in Japan for committing a virtual murder:
The 43-year-old was reportedly furious at finding herself suddenly divorced in the online game Maplestory.
Police say she illegally accessed log-in details of the man playing her husband, and killed off his character.
The woman, a piano teacher, is in jail in Sapporo waiting to learn if she faces charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating data.
She was arrested on Wednesday and taken 620 miles (1,000 km) from her home in southern Miyazaki to Sapporo – where her “husband”, a 33-year-old office worker lives.
[hat tip to Alex]
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oh,my God!
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Define “killing”.
To my knowledge, she merely deleted his character, I guess a game master or someone from the account support should be able to restore it.
The big deal here is that she gained unauthorized access either to the account or maybe even to the computer of the other player and I’m very annoyed about the usage of such terms as “killing” or “murder” – totally inappropriate and nowhere near of what actually happened.
Sadly, a lot of people will get the wrong idea because of this kind of media coverage and I’m a bit disappointed that Japan Probe also uses these terms. It’s bad enough that the BBC uses such a headline…
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Tabloid Journalism standards at the BBC. 溜め息
Somehow “Woman arrested on suspicion of unauthorised access to and tampering with online “husband’s” game account” doesn’t have the same draw.
If backups were kept by the company, it may only be a slight inconvenience.
Advice to all parties in the dispute. “Get a (offline) Life (and protect your passcodes)”
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No, you can’t restore deleted characters in MapleStory. The staff will not do it. It may not even be possible, as there was a hacking incident in the game where guilds were deleted and Nexon was unable to restore the deleted guilds.
I know this because I have played this game – thankfully a different version than this lady, though.
Virtual punishment would be more appropriate than real life consequences. Since she values her online life so much, it would probably be more effective to ban her from the game.
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I heard there are no respawn points IRL.
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o rly?
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Haha. BBC has made itself a tabloid.
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Japanese women are really too much into Internet…I read somewhere that almost 50% ot the 2channelers are women in their 40s.
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I thought women on the internet was some kind of paradox?
hahaha
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Ehm, isn’t the distance between Sapporo and Miyazaki a lot more then a mere 1000km?
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The stupid thing about this case is that the man GAVE her his password and account name…so no “Hacking” was done , she just used something that was GIVEN to her. If I was the judge I’d throw the case out.
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this is quite retarded.
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I do agree.It’s infantile also.Police should concentrate on real crimes rather than that.
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Isn’t this all a bit much considering the game is free-to-play? (free to download and play)
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why don’t they just have virtual police in the game and judges online. then the virtual character can be tried and jailed in the game. Really it was the guys fault for giving her access to his information in the first place.
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That might work out pretty well actually. Considering that she got angry enough to delete his character after divorcing her, I wonder what would happen if she found her character in a virtual prison.
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