South Korea Passes Law To Punish Online Cheaters With Potential Jail Time Or Fines

It’s no secret that South Korea is packed with gamers, even serious gamers, as many eSports competitions reveal. However, did you know that SK is so serious about gaming, that its own government will step in to improve it?

That’s just what’s happening with any and all online games that operate in South Korea. The country’s parliament has just signed into law that it is illegal to both create tools that can enable online cheating, or use them.

In effect, it’s straight-out illegal to cheat in an online game while you’re inside South Korea’s borders.

StarCraft II is an enormously popular online game in South Korea

Here’s where things become a little nutty: if you are found to have committed either crime, you face a staggering $43,000 fine or up to 5 years in jail.

I’m all for punishing online cheaters, because I’ve dealt with hundreds of them across my thousands of hours of online gameplay. I hate cheaters. I can’t sugar-coat it. It’s not fair to me and other people for cheaters to come in and start mucking things up. However, fines like those, and jail terms like those, are downright absurd.

Still, it’s hard to not want a statement like that made in other countries, as well. Penalties shouldn’t be so grandiose, but anything that would legitimately scare people into not cheating online and ruining other people’s experiences would be welcomed by many.

Of course, we have to hope that the systems put into place to detect these cheating mechanics are not going to target legitimate mods. A countless number of online games support mods, some of which could dramatically change the game’s appearance. We’d hope that using such mods would not be considered cheats. This could be a very slippery slope.