> Undoubtedly, if a company offered some sort of account to store that gold, they'd be in deep shit if they took gold from those accounts and sold it to pocket the money.
We've actually had situations similar to this play out.
Star Wars Galaxies had a counterfeiting bug, and Sony responded to people exploiting the bug by zeroing out the money---regardless of whether the holder was a counterfeiter or a victim of a counterfeit---and banning a subset of players who were holding the money.
While the path from "take player money" to "sell the money and pocket the value" isn't direct, deleting money from accounts has the side-effect of making all the remaining money more valuable; in essence, Sony boosted the per-player value of the remaining accounts and future created accounts (though that likely wasn't the intent of their actions; they were just punishing cheaters).
Check the legal history to see what the ramifications were. To my memory: there were none. Game space money bought with real money isn't real money (should it be? Excellent question; I don't believe the law has caught up with that question yet).
We've actually had situations similar to this play out.
Star Wars Galaxies had a counterfeiting bug, and Sony responded to people exploiting the bug by zeroing out the money---regardless of whether the holder was a counterfeiter or a victim of a counterfeit---and banning a subset of players who were holding the money.
While the path from "take player money" to "sell the money and pocket the value" isn't direct, deleting money from accounts has the side-effect of making all the remaining money more valuable; in essence, Sony boosted the per-player value of the remaining accounts and future created accounts (though that likely wasn't the intent of their actions; they were just punishing cheaters).
Check the legal history to see what the ramifications were. To my memory: there were none. Game space money bought with real money isn't real money (should it be? Excellent question; I don't believe the law has caught up with that question yet).