Sony Online Entertainment has decisively moved to protect one of its most valued assets by creating a task force called the Norathian Underground Gnome Investigation Team.  In doing so, Sony will leverage its considerable influence in the digital world by investigating any member accounts newly created to target multi-online gaming platforms such as Sony's "Everquest" and "Free Realms".  This is an exciting and innovative approach to attacking spam violators that potentially ruin the online experience for thousands, potentially millions, of devoted gaming fans.

Traditionally, game publishers have created standards that clearly but generically prohibit spam violations however, multi gaming platforms have introduced a new revenue generating opportunity for spamming entrepreneurs.  Now, any individual interested in gaining access to characters, games, or prizes who are not willing to devote the necessary time to achieving these levels can do so by paying for them with real dollars.  This offers gamers the option of moving quickly through gaming levels with minimal time spent while reaping all of the rewards of real time play.  Interestingly enough, this opportunity feeds key characteristics of generation Y'ers who make up a large portion of the gaming demographic.  Generation Y is characterized as individualistic, technologically savvy, and achievement oriented. 

Spamming companies offer this opportunity by first building a sophisticated network whereby a company will hire a multitude of players whose only job is to execute small gaming tasks on behalf of their employer.  Any characters they generate or prizes they earn are then offered for sale to interested consumers.  Clearly, there is a market for this which is now creating quite a buzz in the online gaming community.  So much so, that Sony has formulated its response by creating the Norathian Underground Gnome Investigation Team.  This team functions very much like a "virtual detective" agency in that they investigate gaming activity they deem suspicious with the intentions and authority to close any accounts that violate the code of conduct standards agreed upon by gamers when initially opening an account.

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Although several gaming companies are plagued with this sort of spamming activity, Sony is the only company to date who has decided to take real action in creating an investigative task force solely dedicated to identifying players who use their account to spam other players.  Sony's World of Warcraft has been hugely targeted by cybercriminals in recent months.  For example, Microsoft removed 463,000 viruses from PCs in August 2009 alone.  The virus they reported is called the Trojan Win32/Taterf, which is a family of viruses reported to steal username and password details for multi online gaming platforms.  As John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment, said when introducing the Norathian Underground Gnome Investigation Team, " People get very frustrated when they see spam. It's the equivalent of junk mail and you're getting this in-game and it's very frustrating".