Planet Sillicon

Law enforcement can track you through your gaming!

By blog on Jan. 4, 2010.

It seems that our gaming is no longer something done in anonymity from everyone save the billing team.

So, I’ll give a brief run down of what is in this news story here that I found via a link on the Penny Arcade news section. Basically, there was once a little drug dealer from America, who was arrested on dealing many types of drugs. This little drug dealer decided that, when the arrest warrant went out for him in 2007, he’d rather not go to court and maybe prison, so decided to skip the country.

This little drug dealer had had friends in his home town, somewhere in Howard County, and he had told them that he liked to play WoW. When the sheriff from that good ol’ county started asking those friends about the little drug dealer, they informed him of his predilection for that stupid game, well, they thought why not send a missive from the king – read, a subpoena – to the caretakers of the land of Warcraft. The sheriff waited and waited, for three or four months, before a wad of scrolls was sent back to him. A package of information about that little drug dealer, what his billing address was, his favourite server, and his character’s names. Funnily enough, he played as a Shaman, not terribly dissimilar from is apothecarish tendencies in real life.

Okay now I’ll drop that pathetically fractured story-teller style and deal with the rest of it. So, after they got all this information from Blizzard, sheriffs at the Howard County used the information to figure out that their quarry had gone to Canada and then enlisted the aid of the Canadian Mounted Police, who picked up the dealer and shipped him back to the states.

This is something that’s not been done before, but it’s very interesting. Personally, I think that everything that was done was completely above board, completely reasonable, and if some scum bag drug dealer get to go to prison as a result, then booyah!