ျမန္မာေတြကြန္ပ်ဴတာကုိ ကေလးကစားစရာလုပ္ၾကမယ္။This is a story that just amuses me, even though it actually does turn out to involve real money. Anyone who has been on Facebook probably knows that there are poker games available on the site. Now in the States, these are just social games played for virtual chips that aren’t worth any real money. In countries that allow legal online gambling, some of the same companies that offer virtual games offer real money games. But for me, the interesting thing about the even the virtual chip games in the United States is that while players can’t win real money, they can spend real money on these virtual chips. This is all part of the Facebook marketing process. Players are only given a certain number of chips each day. Now, they can win chips by playing in poker games, but if they lose their chips, there are only certain ways to get more chips. They can wait for the next day and new chips. They can ask friends to send them chips. They can take part in surveys or other advertising offers that will earn chips. Or they can purchase virtual chips for real money. That’s right – players pay real money for chips that have no real value. Well, except the value to keep playing.
But the news I’m seeing today is that a computer hacker in the UK hacked into Facebook and the popular poker site Zynga and transferred 400 billion chips to accounts he controlled. Then he sold these virtual chips on the black market. Black market? Yes, apparently there is a black market for Zynga poker chips. The hacker made 53,000 pounds from those 400 billion chips, so apparently each chip doesn’t have that much value. But the hacker is still going to jail. Real jail, not virtual jail.
