This is a power point presentation provided to a workshop for Anti-Money Laundering professionals held in Bangkok, Thailand from June 24-26, 2008.

This conference focused on mobile telephones and their potential uses in money laundering schemes. The particular presentation I have linked to was given by the Korean Financial Intelligence Unit and it provides a number of case examples and statistics from that country.

Case 2 is called “Illegal cyber game money case” and it refers to the use of “cyber money” in a money laundering case. The perpetrators appear to have used some sort of intermediary, possibly an auction site or a gold farming operation, to launder what they are calling “Aden.” “Adena” is of course the currency of Lineage II which everyone knows is ridiculously popular in South Korea.

The total amount of the transactions involved in the money laundering schemes was $386,000 between October 26 and December 1, 2005. Since this is only a power point presentation it is unclear how much of it was laundered through this intermediary or was laundered using Adena, but it certainly appears that at least some of it was. I really wish I was there to hear the presentation.

This is interesting to me on a number of levels:

First, this isn’t as big as the $38 Million money laundering scheme that was reported recently by the English sites of Donga Il Bo via PlayNoEvil; however, $386,000 ain’t no chump change either. These are amounts that warrant some attention.

Second it’s really difficult to find credible, public record sources of this kind of activity involving virtual worlds/mmos. The Donga Il Bo article is a great example but it is only one source. All of the other research I’ve seen, including papers on SSRN, in the media and produced by various agencies refer to this activity as a “threat” or “theoretical” but there is very little in the way of actual case examples.

It is possible that the case example provided in this presentation could be hypothetical; however, the details are very specific and it would seem out of context with the rest of the presentation. In addition, this conference did indeed happen, this presentation was given by a representative of the KoFIU and the document is hosted on a World Bank site. At least the source of the information is definitely credible.

I now have two great examples, but if anyone has any additional ones and are able to share I’d love to get a copy of the documents.

Third, and this is more of an FYI, I only came across this when I started researching the use of the word “cyber money.” This was my own folly. I was using terms like “virtual currency”, RMT, “game money” and I even searched using the names of a number of the in-world currencies but I was hitting nothing but dead ends everywhere. Eventually I determined that “cyber money” is a term that is used in association with this phenomenon in other parts of the world.

Having benefited from the information provided on a number of different legal, gaming, academic and security sites, I hope that the community is able to benefit from this information as well.