I also saw the potential for profit here, intuiting early on that anything money touches opens a new vista of exploitation. Once my year of punishment was over, I signed up for my own Everquest account, where I befriended other players and then stole their loot. (Without getting too deep into it: there was no official way for players to trade items in-game, so you had to drop them on the ground, and with practice it was easy to ninja-gank a Willsapper or Circlet of Shadows to sell through online brokers.) By the time the game’s devs caught wise, I had made about $12K. I convinced my mom to open a bank account for me and told her I was selling Neopets, then went on to explain the microeconomics of Neopets until she bluescreened. She liked that I cared about money and stayed put in the basement all day, which meant I wasn’t selling drugs or gender. But with my new debit card I was still making deals, the most lucrative of which was flipping porn domains; a Scandinavian guy emailed me with an offer to purchase mommythroats.com and teenfuck.com for $15,000, a bargain. By graduation I had minted $35K from my modem, though I spent most of that on weed, anime VCDs, and a used ’96 Toyota Camry.