Spammers collect email addresses from chatrooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users' address books, and are sold to other spammers.
Some chatroom users on internet sites catering to devotees have complained that chat counterparts they assumed were female were revealed as male devotees.
Virtual worlds are not limited to games but, depending on the degree of immediacy presented, can encompass computer conferencing and text based chatrooms.