I've been saying for years that the MMO industry has reinvented the central flaw in America's anti-alcohol Prohibition laws, the flaw that turned the whole country over to mafia rule for decades, and that's making laws against selling something popular while leaving it effectively legal to buy it. As long as buyers have no fear of getting caught and no fear of the consequences of getting caught, this form of cheating will always be with us.

A couple of months ago, I tried a free trial of EVE Online. One player showed up in the new-users chat channel with a tale of woe: he said he was a new MMO player, hadn't read the TOS in detail, and didn't know it was against the rules when some ISK seller offered to sell him some ISK, so he bought some. That's not the interesting part, not the tale of woe part. The interesting part, the thing that sucked for him, was that *within 40 minutes* all of the ISK he'd bought had disappeared from his account, leaving him with a negative balance.

If CCP can keep that up, they'll solve the problem, at least in their game. If word gets around that the odds of buying ISK and getting to keep it are nearly zero, if word gets around that spending money on an ISK site just gives away your credit card data and debits your card without benefiting you in any way, if people become afraid to buy ISK in EVE, then EVE's gold sellers will disappear for good without any other action on CCP's part. I can't stand their game, I find it dull as heck, but I'm cheering for them on this subject, and wish that the rest of the industry would (as they sang recently) Harden The F-word Up.