What happens if a game character you've spent $1.4 million upgrading gets accidentally sold by a friend for just $552? As NetEase recently found out, it results in a lawsuit directed at the gaming company who allowed the sale to happen and the friend who sold the character.

As Kotaku reports, Chinese gaming company NetEase runs a massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game focused on martial arts called Justice Online. One of its players managed to spend $1.4 million on his game character and then decided to loan the character to a friend. The trust between those two friends likely no longer exists after what happened next.

The player who borrowed the character attempted to sell it back to his friend at a price of $55,138. However, things went awry when he accidentally set the price at just $552 instead and someone else spotted the listing on NetEase's in-game marketplace and snapped up the character first. What followed was a lawsuit filed by the player who was left without his $1.4 million character, and the focus of his legal proceedings was both NetEase and his friend.

It was left to a judge to mediate the proceedings online. The end result involved NetEase reversing the game character sale and returning ownership to the plaintiff. However, he was also forced to pay nearly $13,000 to the gamer who'd snapped up the character for $552 on the marketplace. That player, after all, was an innocent party in all of this and simply took advantage of a bargain.

What's most ridiculous about this whole experience is that it's even possible to spend over a million dollars on a digital character in a game. What will happen in the future when NetEase eventually and inevitably shuts down the Justice Online servers? These characters will disappear forever and NetEase could end up facing quite a few more lawsuits when it does happen from players who've spent at the very least many thousands of dollars in-game.