5 times the fun, 5 times the pain.. scam warning re:Winged Guardian

[riffraff]

Isn't real world trading illegal in pretty much every game?

RMT in Ultima Online was completely allowed. Houses, characters, items, gold, whatever could be sold/traded for RL money.

EvE Online allows one way "legal" RMT. You can buy game time from CCP and sell it for in-game currency, but it's not legal to sell ISK for money as CCP would not get the money.

Most other games probably followed the EQ model of no RMT at all since Sony somehow pressured Ebay to remove all such categories even when UO gold trading was still quite popular.

[Tonuss]

Yet these guys and the gold sellers spam trade 24/7. Susan says "Hi" again..

I'm not sure it should fall on every player to have to comb the forums for recently posted sticky's regarding this kinda thing but meh. Yeah I got this a link to the sticky from one of the emails they sent after-the-fact which was posted 7 days before I got scammed. A lot of good it did.

Yeah, the way it works leaves a lot of people out of luck when they get scammed. I think Blizzard did it to avoid the hassle of trying to investigate problems that occur at least partly outside of the game, and which are therefore difficult to track. Even in the case of what happened to you (where it would be pretty easy to figure out that you got scammed and track the offender) they will fall back on policy... "the rules say" blah blah blah. It sucks, and that is why I never seek to buy/pay for items where the transaction is half in/half out of the game. If you get scammed, Blizzard will just shrug its shoulders.

[Sam DeathWalker]

It didnt occur to me at the time, before I researched it that you could not buy in game items with in game gold.

It seems that the opposite is true that you cannot buy in game items with rl monies.

If you can't buy in game items with rl monies then what can you buy in game items with? Gold.

I know that this item is from the store and was entered in on battle net but it didnt occur to me that it would be different, the item is visible in game thus seems to me its and in game item.


Anyway big deal, Ill have that 100K or whatever back in a week, I didn't even bother to contact blizz about it, knowing I wasn't going to get anything back anyways.

The lesson is don't buy from a level one ......

[Apps]

eh. Tuna smells.

So, "Gold Farmer" has a credit card, with no balance or maxed out. Purchases the in game $25. Credit card fails. $35 NSF charge per use. 5 Times = $175 in fees. for 71K gold...

There is no way this is profitable. Even at a rate of $18/10K gold, its still a $50 loss.

(No, im not suggesting anyone go purchase gold, I just used google.)

Did Blizz also take away the additional mount count towards your 100 mount achievement?

[thefunk]

eh. Tuna smells.

So, "Gold Farmer" has a credit card, with no balance or maxed out. Purchases the in game $25. Credit card fails. $35 NSF charge per use. 5 Times = $175 in fees. for 71K gold...

There is no way this is profitable. Even at a rate of $18/10K gold, its still a $50 loss.

(No, im not suggesting anyone go purchase gold, I just used google.)

Did Blizz also take away the additional mount count towards your 100 mount achievement?

that's a really good call, so how do they do it?

[ElectronDF]

Gold farmer has legit card, buys 12 keys, sells 12 of them for gold, goes to credit card company and disputes charges. Credit card cancels transactions. Blizzard gets screwed out of 12 purchases, but they then mark items as not valid. Normal person looses item and gold won't get refunded. But gold farmer ended up with gold and no charges.

[Alemi]

eh. Tuna smells.

So, "Gold Farmer" has a credit card, with no balance or maxed out. Purchases the in game $25. Credit card fails. $35 NSF charge per use. 5 Times = $175 in fees. for 71K gold...

There is no way this is profitable. Even at a rate of $18/10K gold, its still a $50 loss.

(No, im not suggesting anyone go purchase gold, I just used google.)

Did Blizz also take away the additional mount count towards your 100 mount achievement?

You're making one fatal assumption.

You're assuming they're using their own credit cards.

When my accounts were compromised a few years back, they were frozen/cancelled/inactive 4 months previous. The person who got my information used a stolen credit card to reactive the accounts to wipe them out and then the owner of said credit card disputed the charges.

[Apps]

Credit Card disputes are generally a 30 day or 60 day investigation mandated by the FCBA. Lost or reported stolen cards can be 24 hrs to 3 days. However, further charges done during that period are not the responsibility of the card holder until the card is locked. Yet, in this case, the majority of credit card companies will require a min payment of $50 to help cover the administration costs to restore all the alledged "fradulent" charges.

So, I guess it would be possible for someone to obtain a credit card, spend over $50 worth of charges in a 24 hr period, report the card stolen, and pay the $50 fine.

Back to the math here:

71K gold at sell back rate is ~ $9.99/10000 is ~$71.00
Minus the $50 Max credit card user liability

$21

Basically, buying 5 or more mounts, scamming the player, would yield you a profit barely insufficent to purchase one legit.
6 and you get yourself a mount... Free.



@ Alemi. Yes, indeed that would be the assumption. I was attempting to determine if indeed it was a profitable scam, worth the time and money to do. Of course, the other assumption would be, the CC's are stolen... then you just got away with in game gold. and sold it for $9.99/10000.

[riffraff]

You can go to the supermarket and get a "pre-paid" visa, stick $5 on it and, from what I understand, bliz doesn't do the processing immediately so.. Blizzard just made this too easy.

Also, they could just use a legit credit card with no balance. The laws changed on how banks can charge you an overdraft fee (they can't unless you opt-in to it) so the purchase never gets approved, but blizzard's half-assed commerce on their website doesn't catch it.

[Bollwerk]

Since this game came out you can go to ebay and buy any number of mounts or special pets outside of game. Yes these were given away in SWAG bags or whatever but it's been quite legit to buy these types of items. The fact that the battle.net site happily applies the code for this mount makes it confusing to the player that it's any different.

Yes, but those cases you mention (ebay, etc), people are paying RL money for a RL item (such as the Blizzcon pet card with the code on it). This has always been fine.

What you and Sam did was trade IN GAME gold to a random person for the code (which is bought with RL money). The code is not an item you can put in the trade window, which is why this is a NO NO.

Again, I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but people on these forums should really know better. =)
Maybe it's confusing to all the millions of n00bs who play, but the people here are/should be smarter than the average player. =)

To sum up, you can buy RL things (Blizzcon pet cards or cards from the trading card game - BEFORE the code is revealed) with RL money, OR you can trade IN GAME gold/items for other IN GAME gold/items (i.e. anything you can put in a trade window or the auction house). The only "exception" I can think of is where you buy a pet code from the Blizzard store and give it to a friend. I think that is OK.

I'm not trying to berate you and I apologize if this comes across that way. I'm mainly trying to clear up any possible confusion for the readers of the boards here.