Yep. You read that right. This morning I found an article from Murad Ahmed in The Times that said that British police — specifically the Central Police e-Crime Unit — have arrested a man for phishing for login and password information for the online role-playing game RuneScape. If the charges are proven true, this crime would be identity theft in its purest form — stealing actual game characters and their goods.

RuneScape is an online game with more than 10 million members, Ahmed said. He didn’t report on how many of those members might be affected.

So why would someone be interested in stealing virtual goods, anyhow? Simply put, there’s a market for it. People want powerful items and characters, but they don’t want to spend the time it takes to go through the game and level their characters up and find rare weapons, so they buy them from others. This can be known as “gold farming,” as Ahmed pointed out. But that term usually refers to the practice of people gaming for hire — earning gold, weapons and other in-game goodies that they can sell for real-world cash. It’s against the rules, but in general, not against the law in many places. Julian Dibbell wrote a fascinating article about gold farming that appeared in Wired about a year ago.

So why did the CPeU pick this man up? Well, it appears that the specialized group was created a little more than a year ago now, specifically to fight online crime. The suspect has been charged with multiple online offenses, so with the lack of detail emerging at this point it’s hard to tell. But I’m guessing if he’d worked in the game for the characters and weapons, they wouldn’t have had much of a case against him. I’d guess phishing for the usernames and passwords is another matter entirely. I’m going to follow this case to see what happens.

I do think, however, that we’re all still struggling with how a virtual economy can coexist with a real economy. There are still questions over whether these goods are truly worth anything, with regard to theft and to taxation.

For more on role-playing games and identity theft, I suggest you take a look at some of our articles on HowStuffWorks.com:

How MMORPGs Work
Why is eBay banning the sale of online-game virtual assets?
Can I make my living in Second Life?
Does the IRS really want your World of Warcraft gold?