The Most Pointless Crime in the World

What happens when Chinese nerds have too much time on their hands? I'll tell you a bit later on when I get to earlier today, but I don't want to get ahead of myself (besides, if I tell you all of the interesting bits now you'll just stop reading.)

Since we got back from the beach I've gone back to job hunting, still unsuccessfully. I'll keep going, but I'm beginning to think my only choice soon will be falling in with the mafia side of my family and performing contract hits for money. Anybody know where I can get a garroting wire? In all seriousness I have a possibility at Macy's working in sales, but that's starting to dwindle as they still haven't contacted me about the interview they said they wanted. So until then I'll keep looking (oh, and if you need someone disappeared... I'm here.)

Beyond job hunting the first couple of days this week were rather dull. Wednesday I went over to Josh Bernitt's house, where we caught up and played a game about a man in Texas in 1911. Think John Wayne meets the slow-mo action sequences of the Matrix.

Last night I was both in charge o making dinner and in getting my sister to a birthday party. To do so, I had to use the GPS for the first time. It took some getting used to not knowing where I was going until 6 feet before I had to turn, and this wasn't helped by the fact that our GPS system likes to mumble. This does not bode well for my upcoming car trip to VA. More on that later though, first, as I promised, I will explain the Chinese thing. Well, today, after helping my neighbors move most of their possessions into storage (they're moving) I checked my e-mail, and found a strange e-mail from Blizzard Entertainment, telling me that my password for World of Warcraft had been successfully changed.

Now, this was odd both because I had not requested a password change and because my account has been inactive and unpaid for months. I don't play WoW anymore, so this raised alarm bells. Five minutes later, they sent me another e-mail telling me that I'd been suspended for conducting "real world cash for gold" transactions. Que??? I didn't even have the game installed on my computer. Thus, I checked my recent e-mail activity and found that China had been accessing my e-mail account remotely. This led me to one of two conclusions:

a) My old World of Warcraft account is of national importance to the Chinese government.

b) I was the victim of a bunch of nerds from china who wanted to use my account to sell non-existent money to people dumb enough to want to pay for fake money instead of playing the game they pay real money for access to to get it.

I figured the latter was more likely. I changed my password and locked them out, so no harm was done. Basically what happened was that someone in China hacked my e-mail account, sent a password change e-mail to my account, changed my password for WoW, and then started using my characters to sell in-game money for real money to nerds. (or people who own this) The really weird thing is that in order to do this, they had to re-activate my account, which costs money because you buy game time, and as I don't play the game I didn't have any. Instead of using my billing information which was in the account, the Chinese guy paid for it himself. Basically, the only practical result of all of this criminal activity was that he gave me $15 worth of game time for a game I don't have. What a nice hoodlum!

So aside from international nerd crime today's been relaxed. Tuesday I'm heading down to Virginia Beach to help judge at the National Speech and Debate championships for the league I competed in in High School. I learned this morning that I'm also going to be in the Alumni program/skit thing, which basically means that Wednesday night I get to get up in front of a large crowd of assembled homeschoolers with some other league alumni and essentially put on an episode of SNL. Fun!

Until next time, or until some Korean dude hacks my e-mail and starts blogging about his kimchii collection, see ya!