Holy crap: over two hundred and eighty thousand cases of identity theft have been reported in South Korea in connection with NCSoft's Lineage.

Apparently, a number of individuals with access to various individual's personal information from their companies' databases leaked lists of various citizens' resident registration numbers to people who operated 'game rooms'. Then...

The seven gameroom operators reportedly hired about 100 part-time game players and made about 14.2 billion won ($15 million) in offline profits by selling cyber items obtained in the process of game-playing. Such items usually take long hours of play and a certain degree of luck. They are sold over Web sites to players for "real" money.

But even though NCSoft knew all about this, including senior NCSoft executives, they didn't actually do anything to stem the tide of stolen identities being used. They covered it up, afraid their profits would go down if it was common knowledge that their system was so insecure.

The article ends by mentioning that nearly a million more Lineage accounts are suspected of being linked to similar identity theft schemes, this time by Chinese hackers. Astonishing. Florian Eckhardt

Police investigate 10 Koreans over identity theft [JoongAng Daily National]