5 times the fun, 5 times the pain.. scam warning re:Winged Guardian
I didn't know really if I should post this or not as it's somewhat embarrassing. I fell victim to a scam in game which cost me 71k gold.
I just recently (about 10 days ago) returned to the game and noticed the Winged Guardian was available. This mount to me looks a lot better than the lame celestial steed that first came out so I was interested. I could not afford to pay $125 for 5 of them so I didn't really think much of it at first. However, last week I had seen someone selling them for in-game gold at 15k each and thought it would be a good investment as I'd be able to use them on all of my characters.
I was sceptical, thinking a scam was involved. He said that he would give me the code first and I could pay him afterwards. This seemed like a pretty safe play so I decided to try it out on my first guy. It wasn't until I re-logged, grabbed the mount from my mailbox and was flying it above the bank steps that I gave him the gold. I went ahead and bought 4 more with no problems at a price of 14k each. Soon afterwards I was soaring around SW with my glowy-winged-lions.
The next day I logged in and saw 2 of them had disappeared. The mount was gone, the spot on my action bars was empty. I figured there was some elaborate scam that he was able to pull off because he was the "purchaser" of the item from the store and had called Blizzard to complain that his codes did not work or some crap. I filed a ticked immediately and it said the wait time was 1 day, 15 hrs! I decided to call billing to find out what's up.
This is what's up. Apparently the way the blizzard store works is this: You can use a non-working credit card to buy an item. They give you the code immediately, and it will work. When they get around to actually processing the payment the next day or whatever, if it fails then they have a system in place where they just take it back, completely automated I'd assume. I explained to the representative that I purchased these from the guy with gold and that he had scammed me using the behavior of the blizzard store commerce and I was told there was "little they could do" and that they "did not support in-game transactions for blizzard store items" from a noreply@blizzard.com email shortly afterwards. I called again the next day to plead with a new rep to get this escalated... surely the GM's had tools to review chat logs, gold-transfer logs, etc. They did file an escalated ticket but again I was given the cold shoulder.
I had given them all the details, including the time of the transaction, amount of gold, and person I interacted with, all within 24 hours of it happening. Apparently their limited resources did not consider this worthy to fix. I guess if someone takes someone's 100g worth of enchanting mats and logs off they can be bothered to reverse that scam, but a 71k gold scam that uses a shortcoming in their website's commerce to help fool the victim is not something they want to deal with.
I'm not posting this to whine as much as to warn other people here who might be fooled as well. I'll recover but it definitely was a punch in the gut after coming back after 5 months off, especially since I felt like had been fairly cautious.
