@inproceedings{e3ff181440e249719cc73bf886e83802,
title = "No silk road for online gamers!: Using social network analysis to unveil black markets in online games",
abstract = "Online game involves a very large number of users who are interconnected and interact with each other via the Internet. We studied the characteristics of exchanging virtual goods with real money through the processes called {"}real money trading (RMT){"}. This exchange might influence online game user behaviors and cause damage to the reputation of game companies. We examined in-game transactions to reveal RMT by constructing a social graph of virtual goods exchanges in an online game and identifying network communities of users. We analyzed approximately 6,000,000 transactions in a popular online game and inferred RMT transactions by comparing the RMT transactions crawled from an out-game market. Our findings are summarized as follows: (1) the size of the RMT market could be approximately estimated; (2) professional RMT providers typically form a specific network structure (either star-shape or chain) in the trading network, which can be used as a clue for tracing RMT transactions; and (3) the observed RMT market has evolved over time into a monopolized market with a small number of large-sized virtual goods providers.",
keywords = "Community detection, Network analysis, Online game black market, Real money trading",
author = "Eunjo Lee and Jiyoung Woo and Hyoungshick Kim and Kim, {Huy Kang}",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018 IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License.; 27th International World Wide Web, WWW 2018 ; Conference date: 23-04-2018 Through 27-04-2018",
year = "2018",
month = apr,
day = "10",
doi = "10.1145/3178876.3186177",
language = "English",
series = "The Web Conference 2018 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2018",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery, Inc",
pages = "1825--1834",
booktitle = "The Web Conference 2018 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2018",
}