Wanted to make this post to see what people have seen with past scam attempts. I got one just a little ago from some random player claiming to be a GM. Of course they weren’t. However according to them I violated the terms of service and needed to use a link to keep to keep my account from being banned. I didn’t fall for it and simply reported them for trying to scam people. Curious what others have seen in terms of scam attempts.
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- Removing the gold right before accepting a trade.
- Selling duped items.
- Emails asking to verify accounts.
- In game scripts that could hook chat messages and do anything that an addon could.
- Tons of bank selling/sharing in the past.
- Occasionally I’ve seen gamblers not pay out when they lose big amounts.
- Paying gold to craft the item then they never do, or run off with the mats.
This is a fun one to listen to.
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Oh there’s the usual ‘mythic geared raid group, looking to carry you through mythic ‘insert current raid’ to give you all the gear/mounts/achievements you want for a low low gold price, group forming now!’
The fake GMs are a classic.
I miss the days of seeing a crap ton of lvl 1 orcs being taking into the Valley of Strength, glitched into the air and made to die so their corpses spelled out a gold selling site.
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All of the above! The bigger the realm the more crapola you see.
Yeah a whisper from someone named Blizzard with special letters saying that I broke the economy and need go to some site or something I report the guy immediately not even 10 minutes later I am on a dif char and get the same whisper from him
“Looking for someone who can pay me a server transfer. I have a deal for you that will blow your mind.” It’s been going on for years on Stormrage.
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Hi, I’m a Zandalari Prince and need help transferring my several millions of Horde gold to Alliance, I need you to send me 200 Anchor Weed…
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My brother fell for one when we started in wrath. We were in middle school and somebody sent a link saying “take a survey and get a mount”.
Needless to say we lost our account for a bit.
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Almost, but make it Zin’anthid instead of anchor weed, princes only deal with the good stuff.
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Haha true, although zin’anthid has mostly crashed in price at this point due to it being over farmed now.
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Badboy addon gets rid of the scam bots and gold selling.
I have not fallen for any scam in years, I think it would have been late BC era when I gave someone mat to make something and he ran off. Reported him, got my stuff back, he never appeared on friend list since then so I think he got banned.
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Why people click accept first is beyond me, get the person to lock in the price first then place your item.
If you hit accept it will go through and uf they pull out it will auto unlock your acceptance.
Also do love me some drama time.
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If a GM were to ever message anyone a pop up would appear not in the chat box that a GM wishes to contact you and you have the option to accept or decline. No official blizzard representative will ever just randomly whisper you through the chat box. Emails and Ticket like responses are the only way. Also you can tell a fake email because their is always spelling mistakes.
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That’s it?
I got a GM whisper me that he needs to login to my account to do some testing, I was fully expecting him to ask my login info but then he says he can login to that character and I can keep playing on the character that I’m playing. Ok then he’s a real GM.
+1
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Its all thats really needed. Its a classic phishing scam. If you do it often enough someone will take the bait.
You can read more about general phishing scams here: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-recognize-and-avoid-phishing-scams
The worst scam I’ve ever heard is calling people and leaving a message that a loved one has possibly died. They leave a number. When you call that number it is one that charges by the minute but they are not required to inform you of that (that countries laws) and the trunk number looked like it was in the US. They would then put you on hold permanently.
Because it was possible that a loved one had died people would stay on the line far longer then they other wise would and wrack up hundreds of thousands in phone charges. They would often set the prices to several hundred dollars per minute.
Yeah I know, but more importantly I know that there’s a lot of people clicking on links without reading the domain in the URL, in the past one of the ways people used to hack others Facebook account was to make a login page that look exactly like Facebook’s and people would submit their login info into the hacker’s database.
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I got one a while back telling me my account would be locked if I didnt cooperate with his demands.
I told him to…well, Im not allowed to say that here, lol
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Came back for the month because ya no virus logged on to a alt and first msg I got they claimed to be a GM saying my payment was declined I would need to allow them access to fix it.
As I was laughing at that one another popped up claiming I had won a year sub/merch just needed to verify info on a wowhead tagged link it was like blizzwowheadgm something like that.
There used to be a weak aura that allowed people to steal your gold.
Customer service on classic is a scam since they actively refuse to actually help our with in game scammers.
Theres the carry scams. Offer free raid Carrie’s, m+ Carrie’s, get your gold and put you on ignore (this is reportable and sometimes you’ll get your gold back - it just depends on how competent the GM that sees your ticket is)
Yeah I think anyone who’s gonna fall for a scam gets one freebie, then they’re usually never gonna fall for anything similar ever again.
Mine was back in Runescape when I was 10 or so. Fell for some dude imitating a GM/Mod/Admin/Staff/Whatever it was called, lost my account. I didn’t think of trying to recover the account back then, I just accepted it as gone and rerolled.
I did run into a couple guys standing around talking about my old account though. The guy who scammed me had been using it to scam more people apparently. Was really weird seeing people talk about my character’s name though. This was like… 5-6 months later.
Tried to recover the account more recently just for the sake of it, but it got banned [obviously] and the appeal was denied and they have useless support so /shrug, no bigs.