This underground trade has historically been closely related to ‘ gold farming’, the practice of playing online games specifically to obtain valuable items and resell them to other gamers. In other instances, in-game items are traded unofficially on online marketplaces extraneous to the game. In 2016, Electronic Arts (EA) reported that loot boxes account for $650 million per year, roughly 30% of EA’s digital sales revenue. 5), sales of loot boxes generated 25% of the global gaming industry’s revenue of $117 billion. Online games are not regulated, which means there are no clear expectations of what game operators can or should do to identify criminal activityĪccording to analysis by Juniper Research cited in the Parliament of Australia’s 2018 enquiry (p. Furthermore, a growing number of games resort to gambling-style microtransactions by selling ‘loot boxes’, a collection of randomly selected in-game artefacts whose contents are only revealed to the buyer after purchase. For example, Second Life and Entropia Universe allow in-game purchases through their official stores.
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This practice is known as ‘ microtransactions’ and is particularly widespread in games that are free to play but offer paid in-game items. Some games officially allow the purchase and sale of in-game items for government-issued fiat currency, such as dollars or pounds. This includes, for instance, artefacts that vest the player’s character with additional powers (such as swords, armour, and magic potions) or ‘currency’ that can be used to purchase them. The key factor that makes money laundering through online games possible is that virtual, in-game items sometimes have a real-life value outside the game. But how exactly can online games be used for money laundering, what evidence is there of this happening, and what should be done about this? The State of Play If criminal money has indeed poured into online gaming worlds, one could hardly think of a better demonstration of ‘the displacement effect’: the notion that as some parts of the economy become ever more tightly regulated, tainted money goes elsewhere, like the air in a squeezed balloon.
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