Billions lost in run on Eve Online bank

News - MMO suffers micro-credit crunch

MMO Eve Online has suffered it's own mini version of the credit crunch, after one of the game's biggest virtual banks suffered a run on it's reserves, after one former operator stole billions in virtual currency from the organisation's coffers.

The EBank theft occurred in early June, when 200 billion in-game kredits were withdrawn by user Ricdic, who changed the currency into real-world money worth over 3,000 GBP.

Details of this scam have only just emerged but this news apparently sparked mass withdrawals from the bank - Ricdic having nabbed some eight percent of the bank's deposits.

"Basically this character was one of the people who had been running EBank for a while. He took a bunch of (virtual) money out of the bank, and traded it away for real money," Ned Coker of Eve Online makers CCP told the BBC.

Ricdic, meanwhile, is unrepentant, despite causing a panic in the online world. "I'm not proud of it at all, that's why I didn't brag about it. But you know, if I had to do it again, I probably would've chosen the same path based on the same situation," he told Reuters, revealing that the money was spent on medical bills and a house deposit.