[Paper Review] Identity, Crimes, and Law Enforcement in the Metaverse

Hua Xuan Qin, Yuyang Wang+1 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Oct 12, 2022

Ethics and Social Impacts of AI27 citations

TL;DR

Proposes an international legal framework to govern identity, crimes, and law enforcement in the metaverse, analyzing cybercrimes and fantasy crimes, and exploring governance with avatars and AI entities.

ABSTRACT

With the boom in metaverse-related projects in major areas of the public's life, the safety of users becomes a pressing concern. We believe that an international legal framework should be established to promote collaboration among nations, facilitate crime investigation, and support democratic governance. In this paper, we discuss the legal concerns of identity, crimes that could occur based on incidents in existing virtual worlds, and challenges to unified law enforcement in the metaverse.

Motivation & Objective

• Motivate the need for an international framework as the metaverse grows beyond geographic borders.
• Examine legal concerns around avatar and AI identity and ownership of digital assets.
• Identify potential cybercrimes and fantasy crimes in existing virtual worlds as prototypes for metaverse crimes.
• Propose governance models (e.g., decentralized, module-based citizenship) to support democratic decision-making and accountability.

Proposed method

• Survey existing metaverse-related projects and policy developments to motivate a universal framework.
• Discuss legal relationships between virtual identities (avatars) and physical-world identities, including the notion of avatars as legal persons.
• Classify crimes into cybercrimes and fantasy crimes and analyze potential criminalization and enforcement approaches.
• Propose design and governance constraints (e.g., avatar registries, AI labeling, modular citizenship, reputation systems) to support enforcement.
• Argue for international collaboration and interoperability to facilitate investigations and democratic governance.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 What legal forms and relationships should bind virtual avatars (and AI avatars) to real-world identities and rights?
• RQ2 Which metaverse activities constitute cybercrimes or fantasy crimes, and how should they be criminalized or regulated?
• RQ3 How can governance and enforcement be organized to be decentralized, modular, and globally interoperable while protecting rights and safety?
• RQ4 What mechanisms (registries, reputation, taxation, taxation) are feasible to deter crime and enable tracking across avatars and modules?

Key findings

• There is no universal legal framework yet; an international framework is argued as urgent to promote collaboration and investigations in the metaverse.
• Avatar identity, including single vs multiple avatars and human vs AI-controlled avatars, poses complex liability and governance questions that may require novel legal personhood and registries.
• Crimes in the metaverse span cybercrimes (e.g., virtual property theft with real monetary value, money laundering, tax violations) and fantasy crimes (e.g., virtual gambling, prostitution, virtual violence) with ambiguous enforcement across jurisdictions.
• A modular, DAO-enabled governance model with citizenship-linked rights and duties is proposed to support democratic governance and scalable enforcement across virtual modules.
• Design constraints (registries, labeling, anomaly detection, and limited cross-border enforcement) are suggested to enable practical enforcement without undermining the metaverse’s decentralized nature.