Japanese man arrested for stalking on Final Fantasy XIV and social media
A man was arrested in Tokyo on stalking charges after he harassed a 28-year-old woman via social media and the Square Enix MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV.
The details:
As reported by Kobe News (via Siliconera), Japanese authorities arrested the man for violating the country's Anti-Stalking Control Law after he was reported for sending online threats to a 28-year-old woman. The messages were sent through social media platforms such as X and Line, but the man went so far as to harass her in-game in FFXIV.
It's unclear how much of the harassment was done through the MMO, but it's been reported that the man tracked down the woman's character and began following her around while sending abusive messages in the game's chat. The woman then blocked the man's account in-game, yet he continued to follow her around, threatening to expose private conversations if she didn't speak to him.
As FFXIV is an MMORPG, players can communicate and play with hundreds of others at any given time, and are separated into regional data centers, which are then divided into smaller servers known as "Worlds." It is unclear how the man found the woman's server and her player character among the thousands of active players.
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