Gold spammers

[Llyweln]

So and So has be demolished killed blah blah by the powers of the Game gods.......our Guilds theory: Gold spammers getting baned, publically.
If that is the case (nothing on the herald, I checked) Appeal every god damn one of em!!!!!

[Slaight]

Yeah it's gold spammer, one of them had msg'd me before he got booted.

[Selwynn]

On one hand this is awesome.

On the other hand, its going to get tedious to have to click and close windows in the middle of my screen while I am trying to slay Order.... would be need if a different colored all cap message appeared in chat, rather than as a must-close window.

But I do think the idea of public condemnation is great!

[Dharnyle]

I think its great. Burn em all. Hang em high. Pop-up windows and all. Send the clear message early that this will not be tolerated.

Its a game, not a job.

[ScarDar]

It is soooooo easy to get gold in this game....

[Zror]

I thought this was one of the best things ever that i saw in an mmo.. game economies can get messed up so easily.. especially with tons of gold farmers.. i've always felt they ruined the game. It makes me happy to see them getting the boot so soon.

[Rusby]

Exterminate with extreme prejudice.

[Knaz]

Ohhhhhhhhh, so THAT'S what that was?! I was wondering if it was some guild loosing a keep or some such.

I agree, this is a very cool mechanic, but it is a bit invasive during game play. If not a separate font in the chat at least make it a unique frame that we can move somewhere else in the custom UI.

[IvarrWolfsong]

It makes me smile... but it can be annoying after a while.

oh and btw, Vanguard did this too. The first time I saw it, the newbie chat was just silent for about 5 secs as veryone realized what was going on. Then "owned" "pwnd" and "LOL" messages flooded the channel :p

[Gramel]

3 cheers for Mythic CSR's for booting spammers today! :p


If you get tells from individuals spamming you, do the following:
Open Help by pressing "H".
"Create Appeal" and list the spammers name & details.
After that, /ignore <dirty spammer name>

[Narg]

Sweet, that man annoyed me all day today! My first ignore ever.

[burt]

I'm using them to get the ignore tome unlocks. :D

[Monstein]

I'm using them to get the ignore tome unlocks. :D

Doh wish I thought of that.

[Boltinheigmer]

Only people i've ignored are lowbies screaming in nordenwatch telling people how to play.

/appeal the spammers. Seems to be helping.

[Boltinheigmer]

Just goes to show that appealing them does help.

I do it every time takes 3 secs once you know where the buttons are.

[Chrysanthe]

I think it's awesome! The pop-up boxes are annoying though, but it's still pretty cool that Mythic is being so aggressive straight out the gate.

[Sentack]

I just wish mythic would implement a single command that A. Would instant report the name I specified as a gold spammer and B. Put the person on my ignore list. Like an /ignore_spammer command. (i.e. something from City of Heroes I saw)

I'm glad to see they are working hard to take out gold spammers, although I think it's awfully funny they have gold spammers already to begin with!

[Rardac]

I got a /tell from someone last night offering gold and leveling services (complete with website!). Is there a way to /appeal?

[SimplyBlue]

I report every single gold seller that spams me. :) Didn't know there was a tome unlock for ignoring people. :D Guess I'll start doing that now too.

[SimplyBlue]

I got a /tell from someone last night offering gold and leveling services (complete with website!). Is there a way to /appeal?

Click on the '?' (Help) in-game and send the appeal as a violation report to the CSR team with the player's name and any additional details like the time they spammed you.

[Rardac]

Thanks!

[Ragan]

1049 accounts banned for gold selling and still rising. :lol:


http://www.warherald.com/warherald/NewsOverview.war

[Radaghast]

Be sure to check out the SPam me not mod that auto reports gold spammer for you.

I saw it was linked on the Herald.

[Aoann]

I second that it works. :D

[Llyweln]

1049 accounts banned for gold selling and still rising. :lol:


http://www.warherald.com/warherald/NewsOverview.war

I think they took a break this weekend....saw no Gods booting spammers :mad:

[Rardac]

I think they took a break this weekend....saw no Gods booting spammers :mad:

as of this morning:
BanHammer 4,051 banned for selling gold
(says the little box on the Herald)

[Ragan]

3000 just over the weekend. B)

They probably stopped the popups because they were banning so many this weekend.

[Antiochene]

last Thursday I had two different characters spam me about gold and pl with a website. I immediately appealed them, but I also checked the level of character they are using. They are using lvl 1's to spam.

They probably have accounts for earning gold and PL'ing and different accounts for spamming. The more we appeal and they get banned the less money they make due to losing an account and the money that said account costs. If all of us report them then we can make their gold selling business unprofitable, and they will eventually stop.

[Sentack]

Gold Farmers are not stupid. I bet 99% of the accounts Mythic has banned have only been the throw away Spamming accounts the groups buy in bulk from digital purchases just to be the paid advertisements they need to get their product announced in the game.

The real farmers use seperate accounts to do everything. One set of accounts farm the gold. They then transfer that gold to a 'Bank' account. Note, all these accounts have completely seperate credit information. so just banning someone's credit card doesn't help things. They then have a separate accounts that are for delivery. So the account that delivers the gold to you, will pick up the gold from a 'bank' account, then hand it to you. This way, the bank account is left separate from the spammers, the farmers and the delivery accounts. So, most of the accounts Mythic ban, tend to be rather meaningless. I mean look at the counter this morning, over 4800 Banned. That's almost 1% of all the accounts sold!!! That's rather insane!

If mythic is Smart, they'll learn to lure the gold farmers into traps. They'll buy gold using a disposable debit card. Then monitor a lot of the exchanges going on between players. Eventually identifying who gave them the gold, then who gave THEM the gold and then who gave that bank character gold and ban everyone involved.

But that's not easy. I bet every minute, all the players on all server, generate about a gigabyte worth of logging information. That's a lot of data to store and then parse. That's why it's hard to get to the root of the problem.

But it's nice to see they are trying.

[Syluna]

Interesting thing I found out after ignoring several spammers, after 5, you earn the title (& tome unlock xp) "The Snob"

hehehe

Syluna the Snob :D

[Gisli]

I'm not convinced that the gold spammers have lost a penny yet. When do the accounts actually get billed? Don't they get a 30 day free trial on new accounts? They just need to get a CD key from somewhere. Possibly they are having to shell out money for the keys, but perhaps they have a way around that too. Does it make sense that they could afford 4000 times 50 (if they pay for CD keys like most of us do) or even 4000 times 15 (a month of service)? I'm not so sure.

Look at it this way. Assume that you already have the game loaded on your computer. Now, if your goal was to get into the game for a day, on an account that you didn't mind losing, could you do that for free?

[Knaz]

I got the spam me not addon & it seems to be working great, BUT... now they're starting to send in game mail messages too!

:blowup:

[Narg]

Indeed... I have been "The Snob" since last week!

Curse of playing day time, which I sence as prime gold spammer time.

[Drakhon]

Gisli, you are correct that the obstacle is the keys. They wouldn't have to pay for the first month, but they would have to pay for the keys. Like any business starting up (or even a branch of an existing business), there are upfront costs that you expect to recoup within a certain amount of time. These companies make a lot of money from other games, so it's not unreasonable to assume that they are willing to put out a significant initial investment to get started in WAR.

True, it's possible they have some way around it, but that would have to be key generators, stolen accounts or brute force.


Key generators don't seem all that likely because the key is validated on Mythic's servers through the account website rather than by any software on the client's machine so the algorithm would be much harder to acquire.
Stolen accounts are possible - people haven't gotten any smarter since WoW after all - and probably make up a small portion of the ones used for this.
Brute force really depends on how robust Mythic's account site is. They've got a CAPTCHA, but those of the random text type like they use are proving increasingly breakable. It's also dependent on how much they limit entry of invalid keys and what actions they take when they notice a lot of them.

In all, unless there was a leak from Mythic (intentional or not), I'm fairly certain they are paying for each key. That certainly seems to be Mythic's belief as well given how quick they are banning these advertizers.

Given the low practical value of gold in WAR to individuals at this time, the more the gold-selling companies have to spend to do their advertizing, the less likely it is that this will end up being profitable. The only really huge gold sink seems to be keep claiming, though that could potentially be a problem for smaller guilds, I suppose, driving them toward gold purchases.

[Gisli]

I don't think it is in the mentality of the type of person who buys gold to buy it for the purpose of helping the guild claim keeps. Maybe I'm wrong.

How much does a key cost? If these people really do buy a key, and if it costs what a retail box costs ($50), then they are now collectively out $200,000. Is that plausible? Is the market really that lucrative to put in that sort of up-front cost? I just don't know much about it to judge.

[Drakhon]

I saw an article fairly recently that made the claim that it may be a $1 billion dollar industry, though it is understandably difficult to actually establish verification of those kinds of numbers.

[Gisli]

I don't think I buy that sort of number. What is the total MMORPG market worth? Maybe I'm out of touch. But ballparking 10 million people at an average of $100/year makes it a $1 Billion/year industry. Even if I'm underestimating the size of the Asian market, we're talking well under $10 Billion/year. I don't believe that the gold seller market can possibly approach 10% of subscription fees. And that was with some really generous estimates. I think we'd more likely be in the $10-100 Million ballpark, even if gold buying is wildly popular.

[Drakhon]

Well, there are approximately 10 million active WoW accounts alone. If we assume the average monthly fee is $14 (which I believe is what the 3-month plan comes out to), that's $168 per year per account, giving $1.68 billion in revenue per year.

mmogchart.com is, I believe, about as reliable as information on these things gets and it shows about 16 million total subscriptions across almost all monthly fee-based MMOs (10 million from WoW). It only tracks paid subscriptions from games like Runescape that have both free and paid subscriptions.

So yeah, $1 billion is probably high for the gold selling market (which I assume includes power leveling services as well), but people do pay a lot for those things when they choose to buy them.

[Chrysanthe]

Just throwing in my two brass coins here - SpamMeNot from Curse Gaming is GREAT! I don't even see the tell spam and it auto-reports the gold spammer as a ToS Harrassment appeal. Nifty neato! All I see in my chat window is the blurb from Mythic thanking me for my appeal, blah, blah. Trust me, I was scrolling that little thank you note from Mythic all weekend.

[Kelan]

I have heard of two different things that may partially explain how they can afford to lose so many keys.

One was that they use a credit card to purchase a box/key, then later call the credit card company saying it was a bogus charge and getting them to remove the purchase. Thus, they don't lose anything.

The other was they actually use the credit card numbers of the people buying gold off them to purchase game boxes.

Not sure if these are true, but I either read or heard this somewhere recently. Either way, they don't seem to be very trustworthy and it sure would be nice if they eventually went away.

[Rardac]

Well, depending on how black market the gold-seller is, they could be using stolen credit cards to start their accounts...although that seems it would make them easy to trace that way.

[Jalec]

I have heard of two different things that may partially explain how they can afford to lose so many keys.

One was that they use a credit card to purchase a box/key, then later call the credit card company saying it was a bogus charge and getting them to remove the purchase. Thus, they don't lose anything.

The other was they actually use the credit card numbers of the people buying gold off them to purchase game boxes.

Not sure if these are true, but I either read or heard this somewhere recently. Either way, they don't seem to be very trustworthy and it sure would be nice if they eventually went away.

You dont **** where you eat... i highly doubt the second scenario.
as to the first after 2-3 times a CC company might have a problem with this.

Logically i would say they are paying and if mythic sticks to its guns we really might see a change. The best part is how the community is banding togather...

[SimplyBlue]

You dont **** where you eat... i highly doubt the second scenario.
as to the first after 2-3 times a CC company might have a problem with this.

Logically i would say they are paying and if mything sticks to its guns we really might see a change. The best part is how the community is banding togather...

Yup, keep reporting them! Download LibSlash and SpamMeNot if you don't want to be bothered reporting people.

[Drakhon]

Well, the disputed charges part is definitely real. MMO companies (obviously especially Blizzard) have a very low rating with the credit card companies because of this.

It is hard to filter these out partly because of the actual stolen credit cards than many farmers use, but you'd think the credit card companies would end up tracking the people that fraudulently dispute charges down. I don't know if legal action can be taken because the ability to dispute is a service provided by the company, though we can hope that it would fall under credit fraud.

[joven]

Well, depending on how black market the gold-seller is, they could be using stolen credit cards to start their accounts...although that seems it would make them easy to trace that way.
That is what bothers me most about these companies.

They are not above theft to lower their costs. Theft of credit cards, theft of accounts... etc.

My hope is that since gold is not that important in this game, the gold sellers will die off.

Leveling a characters takes no time at all also, (when compared to EQ and DAoC) so the leveling service will die off also.

One thing I know for sure, is that gold sellers often inflate the economy via the auction house, to 'create' demand for their gold. The plan is to put 'blue' or better items up for extremely high prices, which imho stupid people then go buy 'gold' to buy the item. which the gold sellers then take the gold from the auction and resell it.

Not only is it important to not buy gold, or use a leveling service, it is also important to just say no to the temptation of 'inflating' the auction house.

[joven]

Well, the disputed charges part is definitely real. MMO companies (obviously especially Blizzard) have a very low rating with the credit card companies because of this.

It is hard to filter these out partly because of the actual stolen credit cards than many farmers use, but you'd think the credit card companies would end up tracking the people that fraudulently dispute charges down. I don't know if legal action can be taken because the ability to dispute is a service provided by the company, though we can hope that it would fall under credit fraud.

When most of these users are overseas in countries like China, there is no legal action our governments can take. China does not recognize any claims of such fraud from american based companies.

[Drakhon]

While most of the companies are based over there, there are definitely ones based here or at least that operate on US soil. Those are ones that are probably not going the fraud route, though.

[Greenmind]

I'd put money on these people using fake ssns and ssns of dead folks to buy stuff. There was a Malaysian guy who worked with my friend at a loan organization who was caught stealing social securty numbers/credit card numbers, buying stuff, and having it shipped to his home town in Malaysia. My friend (who was Chinese) found out about it so he turned him in. His company fired all foreigners including my friend despite due to their inability to prosecute non-citizens. In the end my buddy and the criminal he turned in were forced to return home due to immigration laws.

The whole credit system here in the US is retarded.