NCsoft sued for $230 million

Last month we reported that Chinese hackers were launching massive attacks against Korean gaming sites to gain account information. It now appears that these attacks were successful and a class action lawsuit has been filed in South Korea against NCsoft, the maker of many popular online games like Lineage, City of Heroes and Guild Wars. The suit alleges that around 224,000 people had their account information stolen in the past six month. The information was later used to create hundreds of thousands of new Lineage account.

Thousands of illegally created accounts were used to create gold from killing online monsters and selling magical items, a process which in gamer speak is called, "gold farming". Gold farming has become a multi-million dollar business as people will pay $30 to $80 for a thousand in virtual gold that can be used to buy better equipment or abilities.

The lawsuit is filed through a partnership between the South Korean K.R. law firm and LawMarket Asia, a website that auctions lawsuits to legal firms. Lawyers are suing for $1,000 in damages for each victim ; victims however, have to pay $1 to join the suit.

NCsoft claims that it isn’t liable because the gaming accounts were created in good faith.