My ticket has been in the queue for 48 hours, I’m using the forums to maybe reach a GM to look into this matter and more importantly possibly deter people from gold swapping on SoD. I recently received a 14 day ban for allegedly buying gold.
“…this account acquired gold through illicit means, such as gold buying, botting, or participating in other real-money transactions.”
I know this gets said all the time and most reading this won’t believe me, but I did not and have never bought WoW gold outside of the WoW token.
I’ve been playing Season of Discovery since launch and have been really enjoying it. I see people in trade asking to trade their SoD gold for WotLK / Retail gold all the time. Since I’m not playing retail at the moment I went to trade some gold from my retail account for some SoD gold.
I’ve had this wow account since 2006. I’ve never received a strike on my account (until now) and would never risk that as well. I thought swapping gold between WoW clients was acceptable based on a couple of posts.
Since being ban I should have realized that SoD has some add tech to prevent GDKP and gold buying, so recieving the automated ban seems reasonable and I’m not upset from that. I think if a GM was to look into this matter, You would see the traded gold from the retail account and the SoD account receiving gold right after. No other currency or botting was used.
All you can do is submit an appeal ticket. The appeal is not to plead your case, but get another GM to investigate the evidence logs and will either uphold or overturn the account action.
This forum also is not a place to plead you case (no forums are).
If whoever you traded gold with to get this transfer completed obtained gold from illegal sources, then that is what caught you out.
It was NOT automated. It was applied after investigation. There are no automated bans.
This is likely where the issue is. Most of the people “trading” are scammers using illicit gold. They got your real gold, and you got the dirty gold.
Allowed? Technically allowed. However these trades are unsupported for a reason - they can go bad very very quickly and are super risky. Never ever take gold like that from someone you don’t personally know and trust.
You can appeal, but if the gold was in fact illicit gold from a gold trading account, it will likely be upheld.
Keep in mind, the accounts they use are often stolen accounts gained from phishing scams using in-game messages (go to x website to prevent being banned!), or email scams. Even stealing “customer” accounts from their gold buyers. The account holder reports it stolen and as part of clean up everything gets cleaned - including where the stolen gold went.
I can’t say that is what happened to you for sure, but it is likely.
Edit: Found the Support article!
The exchange of gold or items with another player on a different realm or faction is entirely at your own risk and is unsupported. These types of trades are often associated to the trade of real money for in-game items/currency, which is against our policy, and accounts found associated to these services will have gold removed as well as other possible account actions including up to account closure.
While we will review reports of scams between legitimate players and take action against scammers to remove them from our game, losses will not be restored.
We advise to avoid these types of trades unless you know the other player closely and absolutely trust them.
Thanks Mirasol for the informative post. I think you’re right, maybe I was given dirty gold. I didn’t really think of that.
I did see that article and linked it above as well. Reading it to me sounded like Blizzard would not get involved if I was to get scammed from receiving the gold. Which I understand and took that risk.
if the gold I received was “dirty” gold, then I have no issue with the gold being removed from my character but, me being scammed and having the gold removed PLUS getting my account suspended seems a little excessive and I hope blizzard when reinvestigating my ticket sees that I had no ill-intent.
I guess I just wait for Blizzard to review my ticket. By chance, do you know how long these types of tickets have been taking to get a response back?
Botom line there is no safe way to trade gold across version the criminals that tell u its safe and do the deals outside of wow are usualy lying if blizzard wanted a way to transfer gold theyd have implemented a way.
Yeah, a few days seems to be typical. You can keep appealing until they tell you that they won’t take any more appeals on that issue - that you are crossing into abusing support.
I know I haven’t needed to use Blizzard Support in a while so things might have changed, But my ticket has been open for 7 days. I’m seeing others get their tickets resolved or responded to in only a couple of days.
Is this the new normal? Can a CS rep confirm that my ticket is still in the queue? I tried asking on Twitter but haven’t been successful in getting someone to respond.
Thanks for the response, Orlyia. The first response I got seems to be automated and is a very generic. Doesn’t even mention what the report was for just that I broke the code of conduct.
I understand you’re not the one looking into this and its good to know I’m still in queue. but saying, “The second likely will be as well.” without any details to what I did is a little disheartening. I don’t even know what I posted in the ticket or this forum is the reason for being suspended. Hopefully the person investigating my ticket will be able to provide some level of detail as to what I did.
If it was for the gold swap, did you know and completely trust the individual you were swapping with outside of some discord marketplace?
It’s an unsupported transaction, which means if you end up with stolen or illicit gold from that transaction, you’re on the hook for buying/laundering gold.
Hard to completely trust people online. I was told the gold was legit and they told me they did not get suspended. They could be lying about that, but I don’t know
Would be nice to hear blizzard tell me this. All we can do is make assumptions as to what might have happened. It might not even be related to this.
You’ve have gotten what kind of account action it was; cheating/botting (aka 3rd party actions), real money trade, abovive chat, etc. They’re not going to give details on what/when/how much at the given event.
The fact you got suspended for this screams that the gold you got from the other person was not legit and guess was stolen. Sad fact is there are a lot of gold sellers are all over those trade discords
I’d say it’s impossible, not that it’s hard. Criminals aren’t known for their honesty.
There is a reason this is an unsupported transaction.
Anymore, unless you personally know someone, like - in person, anyone offering this - especially on a venue outside the game, count on being a scammer and a thief.
I don’t want them to tell me how they found out. I just want them to tell me if was from that trade. Did I get “dirty” gold? Maybe it was because I traded a large amount of gold on my retail account?