True pirates in virtual worlds

An interesting adventure happened to my MMOPRG-addicted son last week, when he got his World of Warcraft account hacked and he temporarily lost access to his characters! This is actually the second time this occurs. It is obviously a gross invasion of privacy but I find fairly significant that hackers take pains to steal passwords and characters for games instead of banking information! The benefits resulting from such actions are a priori not so important as to justify the effort, even though this seems a widespread occurrence, since the game company, Blizzard, does reinstate stolen accounts in a reasonable time and presumably prosecute hackers… (In the case of my son’s characters, the first hacker transfered all transferable items (money, weapons, etc.) to another character and the second hacker sold the most advanced of his characters to another player who wanted to start at a high level, with the unexpected consequence that my son recovered his character upgraded in skills and points, plus two free months!) Nothing new about this, but I am always amazed at the time and effort spent on these virtual worlds.