A Japanese woman playing on the Korean game Maplestory has been arrested offline for the online murder of her ‘husband’.

The 43-year-old piano teacher faces a fine of £3,000 or five years in prison if charged. Maplestory is set in a fictional world where players, represented by digital images called avatars, fight monsters but also develop personal relationships, sometimes leading to an online marriage.

The woman’s fictional husband issued her avatar with a divorce. She was quoted as saying that the divorce was sudden: “I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry.”

So angry that she was driven to murder, logging on under his alias and deleting his avatar but she insists she was not intending any form of offline revenge.

She was later arrested on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data as she used his ID and his password to carry out the fictional murder.

After her arrest she was transported 630 miles to the city of Sapporo where her ‘husband’, a 33-year-old office worker, lives.

She is currently waiting in jail to find out whether or not she will be charged.

Poor online conduct is usually dealt with within the confines of the game, where players can be banned or have their online possessions confiscated.

Yet there have been other cases where online lives have spilt over into reality. In August, an American woman was charged with plotting the real-life abduction of a boyfriend she met through the virtual reality website Second Life.