Is this true?!!!

Holy crap: over two hundred and eighty thousand cases of identity theft have been reported in South Korea in connection with NCSoft's Lineage.

Apparently, a number of individuals with access to various individual's personal information from their companies' databases leaked lists of various citizens' resident registration numbers to people who operated 'game rooms'. Then...

The seven gameroom operators reportedly hired about 100 part-time game players and made about 14.2 billion won ($15 million) in offline profits by selling cyber items obtained in the process of game-playing. Such items usually take long hours of play and a certain degree of luck. They are sold over Web sites to players for "real" money.
But even though NCSoft knew all about this, including senior NCSoft executives, they didn't actually do anything to stem the tide of stolen identities being used. They covered it up, afraid their profits would go down if it was common knowledge that their system was so insecure.

The article ends by mentioning that nearly a million more Lineage accounts are suspected of being linked to similar identity theft schemes, this time by Chinese hackers. Astonishing. Florian Eckhardt


*Tro speaking* I didn't write this article, so admins please don't say I'm accusing ncsoft of anything, I was just curious if any of this was true or not? I found it on the following website, dated 7-6-06 about half way down on the page.
http://www.kotaku.com/search/lineage%202/bydate

This cannot be true. Probably it is dis-information from some competitor trying to spook Lineage customers.

NCsoft would have slammed this door shut long before 280,000 accounts got hacked. They would have suspended all log-in IDs, emailed the original owners new Log-In passwords, and told them to change their password when they logged in using the email'ed password.

Thats what ncsoft would do, or what you'd do?

This cannot be true. Probably it is dis-information from some competitor trying to spook Lineage customers.

NCsoft would have slammed this door shut long before 280,000 accounts got hacked. They would have suspended all log-in IDs, emailed the original owners new Log-In passwords, and told them to change their password when they logged in using the email'ed password.

the article says korean ID's stolen not accounts hacked, to play any korean game on a korean server you have to provide a resident number just to create a game account, this resident number is much like the social security numbers here in the US.

I totally believe this could be true, ive read other articles about korea changing their ID numbering system because of the identity theft happening so much. its the only way farmers could get an account to play if they were from a different country.

Thats what ncsoft would do, or what you'd do?

Snap!!