North Korea's Office 39 Uses Gold Farming to Target MMOs

A unit of police based in South Korea has apparently tracked and dismantled a ring of gold farmers that were targeting a number of well known South Asian based MMOs in order to farm gold and then exchange it for real world money, with the portion of the money obtained going to the North Korean regime.

The Seoul based police officers discovered that the hackers were based in Northern China and were targeting games like Dungeon Fighter Online and Lineage.

They had managed to develop a script which allowed the gold farming activities to be fully automated and they were also selling it to interested players in order to get more revenue.

All the gold that was harvested was then converted into real world money and the ringleader apparently accumulated more than 6 million dollars after about two years of activity.

The police believes that a part of this sum was transferred to the North Korean government via something called Office 39, a rather secretive bureau of the administration which is tasked with obtaining hard currency for the North Korean establishment.

They have also been implicated in money laundering, the drug trade and dealing with false currency, mainly dollars.

It seems that the funds obtained by Office 39 are used to fund the lavish life style of the upper echelons of the North Korean government and the development of nuclear weapons by the secretive regime.

The world of MMO games has long been plagued by gold harvesting, where low level characters play the game just so that they get in game currency that can be then sold to other players for real world money.

Some game developers have chosen to create an official market for such trades while others have taken strong action against gold miners, banning them as quickly as possible while also eliminating those players who use the in game gold to get competitive advantages.