The game has always been like this though - my very first “big” raid in we had to take a break because our hunter had to go meet his “Chinese” cousin in Ironforge. Someone had to explain to me that he was buying gold from an illicit website (yes, I has a naive little Gnome at the time).
The difference now, is Blizzard controls it so there is less hacking/stealing of accounts that were used to farm said gold.
