My girlfriend and I have played WoW since beta. I have 2 accounts with 2 level 70s on each, 2 of which are full epic with epic flying mounts, the other 2 are mostly epic. My girlfriend has 2 level 70 toons as well, one with mostly epic gear and an epic flying mount, and the other full epic with a regular flying mount. We are both adults and the original owners of our accounts.
We have not played much in the last month because we're just bored with WoW, so we decided to quit and maybe make some extra money from the selling accounts since we invested so much time into them over the last couple of years.
I put one of my accounts on eBay and was excited when I started getting emails from potential buyers almost immediately. One of the names who emailed me was [email protected]; a name I recognized. I was not sure why it rang a bell, and I am still unsure where I read about this person previously, but I did a google on his email address and he popped up on a scammer list on some obscure forum. I then googled the others (6 total) who contacted me and 5 of the other 6 also popped up on scammer lists (6 out of 7 were known scammers). I emailed the one person whose name did not pop up on a scammer list (incidentally the only one who actually placed a bid) and informed the person that I was taking the auction off eBay and would be finding a *safe* place to sell the account. He replied and said that he understood because he had been scammed out of $450 last week trying to buy an account on craigslist.com.
I spent about 4 hours digging around on the web and decided to try this site because there seems to be a lot of trading going on here, people with verified Paypal accounts, TrustWho verified folks, which sounded good at first, and what appears to be a lot of good information on how to buy/sell/trade safely.
So I signed up and got a MD account and started perusing the forums. I also signed up for TrustWho and started reading their forums. After reading the TW forums I came back to this site and started digging deeper. This is what I have learned from the firehose of information I have absorbed over the past 24 hours:
1. No matter how safe you *think* you are being, no matter how many precautions you take, no matter how many "verifications" you or the person you are dealing with have, there is NO (read ZERO) 100% safe way to buy/sell/trade WoW accounts. Furthermore, writing the account information on a piece of paper and “selling” that isn’t going to save you either, FYI.
2. There are "verified" scammers who are members of this site, currently using it, somehow immune to being banned. One tiger-something basically confessed to hosing another member over some 7 months ago on one of these threads. He told the guy he screwed over that there was nothing he could do because Paypal froze his account. Well, the RIGHT thing to do then is to MAIL the money to the person you screwed to reimburse him/her. Just because YOU got screwed by someone else does not give you the right to pass the screwing along to the next guy. It's ridiculous and criminal, and in all actuality that person could take tiger-whatever to court and get reimbursed simply by the confessions that tiger-whoever wrote on these forums.
3. That TrustWho website is a crock. If you think that little black and white "I'm legit" sign means someone is safe to deal with you are badly mistaken. TrustWho is simply another means for an entrepreneur with a good idea to make $7.50 off of every fool that buys into the false sense of security that "TWV" gives. Any criminal can get hold of a fake or stolen ID, make up an address, go get a Paypal account and register it all to a bogus address and become "TWV" for the low low price of $7.50. He’s in business at that point, ready to successfully pull the wool over the eyes of every sucker in a hurry to buy/sell/trade a WoW account, then scam the snot out of him/her. "TWV" means nothing, and if you are new here, do some research before wasting $7.50 to line the pockets of someone enjoying that steady income for doing absolutely nothing.
4. Judging by these very forums alone, markeedragon.com is where scammers come to find victims. If you are a member here and you are not a scammer, then you are either a victim or a potential victim.
5. Paypal will NOT protect you, verified address or not, and neither will TrustWho, the FBI (I laughed at the "I am working with the FBI post"), certainly not Blizzard since they do not condone transferring accounts, nor anyone else. In the event you are able to recover an account, the odds of it having the 100% epic 70 <insert class> that you leveled still on it when you get it back are pretty slim.
6. If you are in the market to buy/sell/trade a WoW account, the odds of you completing the transaction successfully without being scammed are pretty slim regardless of the medium you choose for the transaction, and that's the cold, hard truth. If you are willing to take that risk, more power to you.
Story: About 8 years ago I got scammed on eBay. I purchased a supposedly “top of the line” computer from a guy on eBay for $850 and I paid via Paypal. His ad said it was the best computer money could buy and it turned out to be complete garbage, slower than the 10-year-old computer I was currently using at the time. I returned the computer to the guy and demanded a refund and he refused.
Paypal was unable to do anything whatsoever to recover my money. To say that Paypal was entirely useless would be a huge understatement.
I tried the Better Business Bureau since the guy lived in Ohio. The BBB did absolutely nothing to help. All they did was add the seller to their list of businesses who had some sort of dispute with a customer and nothing more. They were a complete waste of time and effort.
I decided to play hardball and try the FBI internet fraud department. I attempted to contact them exactly 20 times in a 14 day period, and you know what? They never responded to a single attempted contact. Not one (kinda blows that FBI bullcrap someone posted completely out of the water...don't buy into it, as I am quite positive the FBI is a lot busier nowadays since Sept 11, 2001 than they were back then).
SafeHarbor (eBay) actually DID help, but it took them 9 months to get it worked out through a mediator. During that 9 months I was either emailing and/or telephoning them at least twice a week. Know what the solution was? I received $275 from the scammer.
In the end the scammer ended up $575 richer and he got the piece of trash computer back, so I was purely S.O.L.
I had printed copies of the original fraudulent eBay ad, photos of the garbage computer, a sworn statement and professional assessment of the computer by a local computer shop stating that the computer was indeed not what the seller advertised it as. I had copies of the Paypal transaction and receipt, copies of every single email between myself and the seller, between myself and eBay, Paypal, SafeHarbor, the BBB, and the FBI. I quite literally had "all my ducks in a row" and it did not help one bit.
Furthermore, the guy continued to sell computers on eBay for another year in spite of about a 70% positive feedback rating (it was over 99% positive when I purchased the computer from him).
If all those agencies cannot help when you have virtually every piece of evidence to PROVE that you were scammed on the purchase of a TANGIBLE good, then I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but they for d4mn sure aren't going to be able to do jack about you being scammed on a virtual item that cannot *legally* be bought/sold/traded to begin with because you *signed* Blizzard's EULA. Newsflash: By signing the Blizzard EULA you enter a contract with Blizzard, which is a legally binding document. If the multi-billion dollar behemoth that is Blizzard decided to pursue legal action against people for buying/selling/trading WoW accounts/gold/items instead of simply banning accounts, I guarantee a lot of folks would be in 6'x8' cells because Blizzard certainly has the resources to ensure they come out on top.
So my 24 hours of being a "potential" WoW account(s) seller has now ended. I'm quitting WoW anyway, so technically if I gambled and tried to sell the accounts and got scammed it would not be any real loss, but it is the principle that irks me.
I refuse to be a victim to some snot-nosed nerd who travels via skateboard, or some stinky foreigner half way across the planet who is making more than half the white collar workers in the U.S. by simply suckering WoW players into a scam with a bunch of "Paypal verified" tags, "I'm legit" banners, and "rep" from all his buddy scammers who are giving him bogus feedback in exchange for him boosting their feedback as well in order to promote their ongoing scam business.
Like the little goblins say, "Time is money, friend" and I refuse to be scammed out of mine, be it money or time spent leveling WoW toons. I'd rather delete all my characters than fall victim to scammers.
I wish those few (VERY FEW) of you who are truly legitimate all the very best of luck in your endeavors buying/trading/selling. Be careful!
To Markee: You seriously need to clean this place up. Read your own forums and start cracking heads or your website will continue to be nothing more than a feeding ground for scamming predators. Half of the idiots are confessing to being scammers in black and white right here on your own forums. Why not get rid of them? Stop promoting the TrustWho crap because it really is just that - crap, and any lawyer will tell you the same.
Best wishes & happy holidays.
Ciao
We have not played much in the last month because we're just bored with WoW, so we decided to quit and maybe make some extra money from the selling accounts since we invested so much time into them over the last couple of years.
I put one of my accounts on eBay and was excited when I started getting emails from potential buyers almost immediately. One of the names who emailed me was [email protected]; a name I recognized. I was not sure why it rang a bell, and I am still unsure where I read about this person previously, but I did a google on his email address and he popped up on a scammer list on some obscure forum. I then googled the others (6 total) who contacted me and 5 of the other 6 also popped up on scammer lists (6 out of 7 were known scammers). I emailed the one person whose name did not pop up on a scammer list (incidentally the only one who actually placed a bid) and informed the person that I was taking the auction off eBay and would be finding a *safe* place to sell the account. He replied and said that he understood because he had been scammed out of $450 last week trying to buy an account on craigslist.com.
I spent about 4 hours digging around on the web and decided to try this site because there seems to be a lot of trading going on here, people with verified Paypal accounts, TrustWho verified folks, which sounded good at first, and what appears to be a lot of good information on how to buy/sell/trade safely.
So I signed up and got a MD account and started perusing the forums. I also signed up for TrustWho and started reading their forums. After reading the TW forums I came back to this site and started digging deeper. This is what I have learned from the firehose of information I have absorbed over the past 24 hours:
1. No matter how safe you *think* you are being, no matter how many precautions you take, no matter how many "verifications" you or the person you are dealing with have, there is NO (read ZERO) 100% safe way to buy/sell/trade WoW accounts. Furthermore, writing the account information on a piece of paper and “selling” that isn’t going to save you either, FYI.
2. There are "verified" scammers who are members of this site, currently using it, somehow immune to being banned. One tiger-something basically confessed to hosing another member over some 7 months ago on one of these threads. He told the guy he screwed over that there was nothing he could do because Paypal froze his account. Well, the RIGHT thing to do then is to MAIL the money to the person you screwed to reimburse him/her. Just because YOU got screwed by someone else does not give you the right to pass the screwing along to the next guy. It's ridiculous and criminal, and in all actuality that person could take tiger-whatever to court and get reimbursed simply by the confessions that tiger-whoever wrote on these forums.
3. That TrustWho website is a crock. If you think that little black and white "I'm legit" sign means someone is safe to deal with you are badly mistaken. TrustWho is simply another means for an entrepreneur with a good idea to make $7.50 off of every fool that buys into the false sense of security that "TWV" gives. Any criminal can get hold of a fake or stolen ID, make up an address, go get a Paypal account and register it all to a bogus address and become "TWV" for the low low price of $7.50. He’s in business at that point, ready to successfully pull the wool over the eyes of every sucker in a hurry to buy/sell/trade a WoW account, then scam the snot out of him/her. "TWV" means nothing, and if you are new here, do some research before wasting $7.50 to line the pockets of someone enjoying that steady income for doing absolutely nothing.
4. Judging by these very forums alone, markeedragon.com is where scammers come to find victims. If you are a member here and you are not a scammer, then you are either a victim or a potential victim.
5. Paypal will NOT protect you, verified address or not, and neither will TrustWho, the FBI (I laughed at the "I am working with the FBI post"), certainly not Blizzard since they do not condone transferring accounts, nor anyone else. In the event you are able to recover an account, the odds of it having the 100% epic 70 <insert class> that you leveled still on it when you get it back are pretty slim.
6. If you are in the market to buy/sell/trade a WoW account, the odds of you completing the transaction successfully without being scammed are pretty slim regardless of the medium you choose for the transaction, and that's the cold, hard truth. If you are willing to take that risk, more power to you.
Story: About 8 years ago I got scammed on eBay. I purchased a supposedly “top of the line” computer from a guy on eBay for $850 and I paid via Paypal. His ad said it was the best computer money could buy and it turned out to be complete garbage, slower than the 10-year-old computer I was currently using at the time. I returned the computer to the guy and demanded a refund and he refused.
Paypal was unable to do anything whatsoever to recover my money. To say that Paypal was entirely useless would be a huge understatement.
I tried the Better Business Bureau since the guy lived in Ohio. The BBB did absolutely nothing to help. All they did was add the seller to their list of businesses who had some sort of dispute with a customer and nothing more. They were a complete waste of time and effort.
I decided to play hardball and try the FBI internet fraud department. I attempted to contact them exactly 20 times in a 14 day period, and you know what? They never responded to a single attempted contact. Not one (kinda blows that FBI bullcrap someone posted completely out of the water...don't buy into it, as I am quite positive the FBI is a lot busier nowadays since Sept 11, 2001 than they were back then).
SafeHarbor (eBay) actually DID help, but it took them 9 months to get it worked out through a mediator. During that 9 months I was either emailing and/or telephoning them at least twice a week. Know what the solution was? I received $275 from the scammer.
In the end the scammer ended up $575 richer and he got the piece of trash computer back, so I was purely S.O.L.
I had printed copies of the original fraudulent eBay ad, photos of the garbage computer, a sworn statement and professional assessment of the computer by a local computer shop stating that the computer was indeed not what the seller advertised it as. I had copies of the Paypal transaction and receipt, copies of every single email between myself and the seller, between myself and eBay, Paypal, SafeHarbor, the BBB, and the FBI. I quite literally had "all my ducks in a row" and it did not help one bit.
Furthermore, the guy continued to sell computers on eBay for another year in spite of about a 70% positive feedback rating (it was over 99% positive when I purchased the computer from him).
If all those agencies cannot help when you have virtually every piece of evidence to PROVE that you were scammed on the purchase of a TANGIBLE good, then I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but they for d4mn sure aren't going to be able to do jack about you being scammed on a virtual item that cannot *legally* be bought/sold/traded to begin with because you *signed* Blizzard's EULA. Newsflash: By signing the Blizzard EULA you enter a contract with Blizzard, which is a legally binding document. If the multi-billion dollar behemoth that is Blizzard decided to pursue legal action against people for buying/selling/trading WoW accounts/gold/items instead of simply banning accounts, I guarantee a lot of folks would be in 6'x8' cells because Blizzard certainly has the resources to ensure they come out on top.
So my 24 hours of being a "potential" WoW account(s) seller has now ended. I'm quitting WoW anyway, so technically if I gambled and tried to sell the accounts and got scammed it would not be any real loss, but it is the principle that irks me.
I refuse to be a victim to some snot-nosed nerd who travels via skateboard, or some stinky foreigner half way across the planet who is making more than half the white collar workers in the U.S. by simply suckering WoW players into a scam with a bunch of "Paypal verified" tags, "I'm legit" banners, and "rep" from all his buddy scammers who are giving him bogus feedback in exchange for him boosting their feedback as well in order to promote their ongoing scam business.
Like the little goblins say, "Time is money, friend" and I refuse to be scammed out of mine, be it money or time spent leveling WoW toons. I'd rather delete all my characters than fall victim to scammers.
I wish those few (VERY FEW) of you who are truly legitimate all the very best of luck in your endeavors buying/trading/selling. Be careful!
To Markee: You seriously need to clean this place up. Read your own forums and start cracking heads or your website will continue to be nothing more than a feeding ground for scamming predators. Half of the idiots are confessing to being scammers in black and white right here on your own forums. Why not get rid of them? Stop promoting the TrustWho crap because it really is just that - crap, and any lawyer will tell you the same.
Best wishes & happy holidays.
Ciao
