Why Was the Official Statement Ignored?

[EmiliM]

Counterfiet currency is counterfeit. This is your memo: all gils invovled in RMT activites are counterfeit currency. In reality, any business receiving counterfeit currency is a loss they have to take.

That's basically how I see it. It's not so much that the money taken away were "dirty", it's that they were "fake" money put into circulation by a faction engaged in (in a game sense) illegal money production. It doesn't matter how the money was generated, the rule of the land (SE's rules) dictates what is legit and what isn't.

In real life, businesses that unknowingly accepted counterfeit money had no real recourse and in most cases would simply have to write it off as a loss. Of course, even in the worst regions of the world, it's unlikely that the majority of the currency in circulation would be fake, and even if that was the case, no government would swoop in and confiscate and destroy 99% of cash taken from businesses chosen simply because they had over a certain level of assets and therefore arbitrarily deemed likely to have benefited from counterfeit money.

This kind of "solution" would be unthinkable in real life. The thing is, this isn't real life. SE is not a government, and players are not businesses. Yes, this is a case of the richest being punished simply for being rich and prominent, but consider the scale of the issue: 367.7 billion divided by ~50 servers = 7.35 billion per server, divided by about 5000 players on each server = 1.47 million gil per user. Considering your average player probably only has 1/10 of that, you could (roughly) argue that the vast majority of gil present in a server were generated by RMT. If this happened in real life, the economy would collapse in an instant. SE simply did what no government could do in real life in order to preserve an economy that could not be saved in any way in real life.

Ultimately, you can only blame SE and they can only sit there and take it. But as far as I can tell, this is a case of choosing the lesser evil so I'm pretty sure they expected flak no matter what they did. I wouldn't expect them to bend over backwards now for doing the only thing they could.