Police search for stolen virtual furniture from Habbo Hotel

Police in Finland have reportedly searched homes in five cities, confiscating computer equipment in a hunt for items stolen from a virtual world.

Habbo Hotel’s virtual furniture, known as “furni” by players, are purchased with credits and traded in the online community to furnish the virtual hotel rooms. The credits are bought by members with real money.

According to Detective Sergeant Marko Levonen, Finnish authorities are looking into up to 400 cases of theft, with some players of Habbo Hotel reporting that they have lost up to 1000 Euros worth of virtual furniture.

Using phishing pages and keylogging spyware, hackers are able to steal the usernames and passwords of online game players, and then purloin their virtual goods and attributes to sell on to others.

It may seem petty to complain about something being stolen that never…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.