This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).
Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out a couple of months ago, and (as you are almost certainly aware) it was a massive hit. It's a life simulator where you live on an initially deserted island and slowly build a community of cartoon animals, with several hundred to choose from. It's designed to be a peaceful, calm experience where you do nothing but hang out, so of course people have built a greedy, brutally efficient underground economy.
Getting new villagers can be difficult, since your island can only have ten of them at any one time. There are only two ways to replace them once you've hit that limit: the first is to wait until a visitor arrives at your island, then invite them to stay, at which point you can replace one of your current villagers with the new one. The second way is to wait until one of your villagers randomly decides to leave on their own, then travel to other deserted islands to find a new inhabitant. Since the villager on each deserted island you visit is random, it costs 2,000 Nook Miles (more on that later) to travel to each one, and there are around 400 villagers, your chances of getting a specific villager either on an island or as a visitor is extremely low.
Now, there are obviously villagers that are more popular, and ones that are...not. Villagers such as Barold or Rodney tend to be hated, and the difficulty of getting them to leave your island means that there are multiple subreddits dedicated to complaining about them. Meanwhile, other villagers are in huge demand, none more so than Raymond. Raymond's popularity is partly due to his design, but mostly (I suspect) because the initial hype over his character has made him popular for being popular.
Now, it's possible to "give" someone a villager by having them visit your island while that villager is moving out, and since a villager's house is filled with cardboard boxes while they're in the process of moving out, this is referred to as being "in boxes". It didn't take long for people who had Raymond to start selling him to others who wanted him on their island, and having "Raymond in boxes" became a meme. While other villagers are sometimes sold, none of them can hold a candle to Raymond in terms of demand.
Pretty soon, the main currency, Bells, was abandoned in favor of Nook Miles Tickets, items which allow you to travel to a deserted island and which can only be bought with Nook Miles, which are harder to farm than Bells are. (The best way to farm Bells is to travel to other people's islands to take advantage of random fluctuations in the price of turnips. And yes, there are people charging Bells or Nook Miles Tickets in exchange for being able to sell turnips on their island.) Raymond was commonly sold for around 500 Nook Miles Tickets. For reference, each ticket costs 2,000 Nook Miles, and completing tasks such as "Catch 5 fish" or "Talk to your neighbors 3 times" will get you an average of around 150 miles each. 500 Nook Miles Tickets (or NMT) are equal to a million Nook Miles, so people were spending exorbitant amounts on Raymond. For a lot of people, this level of greed, especially in a game specifically designed to be relaxing and stress-free, tainted Raymond by association, so he's now both the most loved and the most hated character in the game.
This was bad enough, but eventually someone realized that this was a good chance to make some real money. When I was finding images for this post, the second result on Google Images was someone selling Raymond for $13 in real-life money. I've heard rumors of Raymond being sold for even more than that, or traded for nudes. On top of this, hacking the game allows you to get items that aren't normally obtainable, such as trees with stars growing on them. So there are now people selling items they've hacked into the game (and which may or may not corrupt your game file) in exchange for real money.
However, some people are fighting back. A hacker recently offered Raymond for free to anyone who wanted him, both in order to help people out and to kill the black market that has started up. I don't know what this is going to do to the underground villager market, but it's almost certain that it's going to take a big hit.
TL;DR People have hacked Animal Crossing to make money off of a furry slave trade.
Disclaimer
This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.
Read the original here