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UK Prisoners Allegedly Running Crime Syndicates with PlayStations

by Terrence O'Brien on May 19, 2009 at 07:23 AM

Sure, you can use the PlayStation 3 to play games and watch Blu-ray movies -- heck, you can even use it to study gravity. But the latest interesting and unique usage of the console comes from Britain, where the country's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) is alleging the gaming machine is being used to run massive crime syndicates.

According to a recently-released report by SOCA, prisoners are using chat rooms in online games and coded language to get information and orders to criminal co-conspirators on the outside. The Prison Service (PS), the organization that handles prison security, reacted harshly to the charges, however, since it was not warned that the allegations would be included in the annual report.



PS officials vehemently denied that prisoners had access to gaming technology capable of connecting to the Internet, saying that the current-generation consoles are banned because they have that ability. Though we know from this story that they have access to video games, SOCA did not specify which consoles prisoners possess and have yet to reveal the source of the information.

The two organizations have since kissed and made up, promising to cooperate to keep prisoners from getting their hands on technology like these consoles and cell phones that would allow them to contact the outside world. If this is really the case, it just makes last year's report that taxpayers were footing the bill to put consoles in prisons all that much worse. [From: Times of London via Fox News]

Tags: crime, criminals, internet, jail, playstation, prison, top

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