You've Been E-robbed!

There are many online games that have entire communities with their own little e-economies (that doesn't really work out as a neologism does it?). With e-economies and e-currency come e-thieves. Game communities such as Runescape and World of Warcraft have their own currency, often in-game gold, used to purchase items to make characters more powerful. There are even people who buy and sell fake money with real money on sites like ebay. Oftentimes people try to take advantage of this. There are people who write programs to "gold farm" (earn massive amounts of gold) or resort to stealing from other players in order to sell said gold for real money. A man using phishing schemes in order to access and steal from accounts in England was recently arrested on misuse of computers charges. I find this to be a very strange occurrence that a man was arrested and charged with a real crime for stealing fake money which he used to make real money. Is suppose it is a real crime if he obtained the money in a fraudulent manner but I think it would be very tough to prove that a crime has been committed. Perhaps English laws differ but I think a good attorney could get him off on these charges.