About 10 million people play World of Warcraft, the web’s most popular online multi-player game. How many of them know they could be gaming alongside money launderers? (This has nothing to do with online organizing or politics, but it fascinates me nevertheless.)

I recently had the pleasure of meeting a super-smart Internet security analyst, Andrew Jaquith. He gets paid to understand how hackers, spammers and web criminals make money off us, the unsuspecting online masses. How cool of a job is that? Clearly, I’d found the guy to answer my nagging spam questions.

I’ve always wondered how spammers hide their money tracks. Once you start dealing in real dollars, I assumed, it should be fairly easy to follow the money. If someone clicks through a Viagra spam and actually plunks down a credit card, that money gets transfered to a real bank account somewhere. Even if the money gets passed from account to account, in and out of Switzerland or the Bahamas, shouldn’t authorities be able follow the money trail to an ultimate recipient? I always assumed spammers wouldn’t stoop to the level of real-world money laundering … way too meatspace for online criminals. Then how to launder the profits?

One common spammer scheme, Andrew explained to me, involves World of Warcraft (WoW). Spammers set up bank accounts to receive the original purchase. Once the money hits that account, the spammers use it to “buy” digital currency — WoW gold. Gold is usually used to buy digital swords and armor and the like from other players. Those items can be given to another “player’s” account (also controlled by the spammer), sold to a third party to recoup the gold, and then extracted from the game as real dollars. Since the authorities are nowhere near smart enough to trace hand-offs inside World of Warcraft, poof! The money trail has disappeared.

So the next time a strange warlock offers to sell you an incredibly valuable Pegasus, you may want to think twice!