I help manage the community discord for Shadowstrike-AU SoD realm.
We have had many reports of one player who follows around people selling enchanting services and stealing the mats from their customers by opening trade first.
This leads to lots of very upset people who have lost very expensive enchant mats, and accuse the enchanter of stealing them (they didn’t).
This has been going on for a few days now, people seem to be confused about how to report it as they don’t know the name of the person who stole their mats.
The thief seems to be using a macro/script/bot to trade the targets and ‘force’ themselves in, somehow, i don’t understand it. If you look his target of target window it’s flashing around constantly like it’s scanning nearby players.
What can be done here? Can I gave a name to a GM to have their account investigated or something? They are already blacklisted by our community addon but it’s not enough.
They need to be reported by someone who got scammed. The transactions have to be talked about in game, not on discord. If only on discord bliz will have no way to know what if any agreement happened. Will look like someone just randomly gave them enchanting mats.
I would hope that blizz could see that they made an agreement with one person and then a trade was initiated from a different person, followed by some very confused messages.
Repeat this many many times for this one individual.
Yep, that is why I am posting here asking what can possibly be done in this situation.
They are struggling to report as, at the time, they have no idea who they gave the mats to. They only find out after they come to the discord to report the enchanter for our blacklist, then we tell them they got scammed by this guy instead.
Very few of them have trade logging addons such as TSM.
He’s been at this for days and I don’t expect him to stop any time soon.
I’m not allowed to post a name here due to forum rules, so I am hoping that blizz CS can assist manually?
agreement is made with legit enchanter to buy an enchant
victim approaches enchanter to give them mats
scammer opens trade with them before enchanter can, mats are handed over
scammer walks away, victim opens trade with enchanter expecting enchant, confusion and anger sets in.
As said in the first post he seems to be using a target of target macro to find who the enchanters are about to trade and opening trade first, it’s consistent. This has been reported by many people in our discord already, i assume many more in game who don’t know about our disc (about 10-20% of the realm pop are in the disc)
I would hope that if a human looked at this account and saw it accumalating a huge pile of enchanting mats, on a character that doesn’t have enchanting, from various strangers that it has absolutely no prior interaction with, that they could determine some foul play.
Alas, I will simply continue to advise people to try to find that person in game and report them. Usually by the time they find out they’ve been scammed and who did it (we tell them in disc), the scammer is long gone and the victim can’t report them from the chat box (because no chat interaction).
At least our addon will flag a big warning in chat when opening a trade with this particular scammer.
Make sure to warn clients, and tell them specifically to carefully check the character names. It shows that at the top. If the name don’t match, don’t trade. You could also go to a different area to trade, even just outside the city gates would likely be far enough from the busy hub area.
I’m honestly not sure what blizzard could do here? There is a pop-up that warns users they are about to do a trade and if they want to continue. The user agreed to the trade, they weren’t paying attention to what they were doing. Such is scummy and I don’t condone it at all, but I don’t think the user is breaking any actual rules.
Edit to add; now if they are using some sort of bot/script/back to achieve the opening of trade windows, that’s a whole other discussion.
We really do need a complaint from one of the players that had this happen - but that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. Provided you have enough information.
hacks@blizzard.com is an email you can send any info on this that you have. But you are going to need the character name/realm of the offender - and any of the same of victim’s that you may have.
But yes, there is a reason there are confirmation windows on trades. That doesn’t mean someone running around doing this is acceptable.
Note that the character names are in the trade window, so the information is there if you look for it.
Confirm the trade window is from the character you think you’re trading with. Note the name if it isn’t so you can target them (they need to be pretty close to impose their trade window) and report them off the menu in their unit frame.
I would think that even if the person who got their materials swiped reports the wrong person an investigation would see where the traded materials went to, wouldn’t it?
Keeping people aware through your Discord to always check to make sure they’re trading with the right person and that this kind of thing might be happening is good too.
Although, and this is just me being tinfoil hat about it, if the scammer knows exactly when and where to open a trade window, I’d wonder if there’s some level of collusion between the “scammer” and the “innocent” party.
Sure the trade window name exists but there are ASCII characters that look the same that arent or are close enough when you gaming away and not expecting this its reasonable to have missed.
If your point is that scammers are going to make it hard to report them, that’s obvious.
But unless they are rolling up a character to imitate the name of the intended crafter, it would not be hard to say “that’s not the name of the character I’m supposed to be trading with” and cancel the trade.
And they would still have to be close to open a trade window, so you can find them and select them by pointer to report them.