MMO developers keep telling us that trading ingame currency for real money is dangerous, and despite the hype it looks like it actually might have been in this case. A 19 year old Fordham student named Humza Bajwa put a BB gun to the head of a fellow student he met and demanded he transfer 4.7 Billion Runescape coins. The deal started harmlessly enough, he was supposed to meet and buy the coins for $3,300, but quickly escalated when the seller realized Bajwa's real cash was fake.

This is the sort of bad press that gaming doesn't need, but it sure is creepy. MMOs can be quite addicting, so I suppose it's not surprising that players could mimic real drug crimes. Crazy is as crazy does. I just hope that this is the worst it gets and players don't turn to real guns. If it does get worse you can bet that there's going to be an attempt to regulate the gaming industry even further. For this misguided kid, his life is pretty much over, and he's looking at charges that could put him in jail for over a decade.