Companies like IGE will buy ingame currency for real money, although the price they buy at is much lower than the selling price, hence my preference for donating real money directly through UN-sponsored organizations.
The amount of money that companies like IGE pay is significant to people in many Asian countries due to the exchange rate. This is why many of the gilsellers in FFXI are Chinese--in China, the IGE equivalent of 1 million gil is enough to support a person comfortably for something like a month. But if you give a gilseller 1 mil, they get something like $25, whereas IGE will charge me $40-$50 for the same 1 million gil, meaning that IGE is getting fat and the people in China are just getting enough to get by. If you want to donate, it is much better to send the $50 directly, that way IGE gets nothing for being bandits who sell other people's property, and the people in the tsunami-devastated countries get the full benefit of what the game player is giving up.
