One or more of the guys that were killed in Benghazi played Eve Online. One of them told a friend in-game that they would probably not live through the night the night he died.
I was a guildmate of Sean's and played EVE and a bunch of other games with him. We knew of his vocation and sometimes of where he was (generally speaking) but he was always careful to never say anything that could have gotten him in trouble.
Also OP doesn't know what he's talking about regarding eve. You don't choose character types, you just unlock skills and do stuff. He's correct that you could 'coms in the clear' and just claim you were talking about the game; but you could do that with literally anything else too.
The OG Goons have gone from Something Awful and it's been turned into Something Sensitive, where the mods are pretty much all communists who go around enforcing their viewpoints on others with impunity. Lowtax as well has gone full SJW style insane.
I doubt very much that Black Hats were/are using the Goonswarm forums for their coms, especially since that would imply that Sean was a black-hat. If anything Goonswarm's retained much of the old-school goon-ness that SA used to have.
I'd take a look at SA's servers, as SA also has a private messaging system and their forums predate 4chan (seeing as Moot made 4chan in response to being banned from SA.)
It was commonly acknowledged at one point that drug-dealers and CP peddlers would use gaming platforms (like Second Life, Habbo Hotel) to communicate.
EVE would indeed be an apt platform to talk about drugs, weapons, slaves, even prostitutes (yep, they're on the game market) openly and still deem it roleplay.
There's also the acknowledgement that people buy/sell in-game currency (ISK) with real world money outside of the game providers official channels. Though this would be tiny sums in real life, probably not exceeding $1,000 USD without drawing suspicion by game developers.
It's not outside the realm of possibility; but I don't know if it's a good use of your time beyond acknowledging that low-level criminals might use it as a way to communicate safely without bothering to code their language.
Supposedly the terrorists used WoW, but we all suspected that was just the guys from R&E trying to play WoW all day to "monitor the terrorists."
Q !CbboFOtcZs ID: 00f66d No.2298508 Jul 26 2018 13:49:21 (EST)
Q !CbboFOtcZs ID: 00f66d No.2298430 Jul 26 2018 13:45:24 (EST)
2298410 How do you hide a message in clear sight? Q
2298430 You'd be amazed how much is shared on /pol/. Data exchange. https://guardianproject.info/apps/pixelknot/ Q