"People are willing to buy on the black market," said Javier Santoyo, senior manager of Symantec's security response team. "If players themselves were not willing to go outside the games to improve their characters, then there wouldn't be such a need."
But for players like Adam Satterfield, a 28-year-old IT consultant from Atlanta, the downside to having a WoW account hacked and subsequently banned goes beyond losing in-game assets.