http://news.independent.co.uk/digital/news/story.jsp?story=481707(link to the original source of the story)
You can go to eBay and see people buying and selling characters that are already well-built up (level experience, items, etc). I used to have an online buddy who did it for a living. In too many ways the online gaming community is no different from the real world - people want to take short cuts.
I had experience in a massive web-based multiplayer; initially there were two groups who did very well — the intuitive players who built successful communities (whole is larger than the sum of its parts), and number crunchers who succeed individually, mostly by taking advantage of the weaker players in their own community.
When the number crunchers saw that they'd get their asses kicked when they pissed off a tightly-knit community of smaller players, they took a short cut - very illegally - to build their own *much* larger community. To keep up with them, the legit communities often imposed a sort of communist economy/resource system or brought in ringers of their own and imposed strategies on everyone. It was very successful but killed individuality within those communities.
There were several out-of-game "newspapers" or websites, but unlike the professor, they didn't go out of their way to publish where the 'cheats' could be found. The difference being, the game's elite players who used the cheats didn't want the masses catching on.
That and much other stuff that went on were eerily similar to real life. It's where I got my education in global politics :)