OK, don’t laugh, but there’s a peculiar WoW Gold scam going around where fake artists are promising to deliver illustrations in exchange for WoW Gold.

Creativity truly knows no bounds for the perpetually cash-strapped. This is definitely one of the odder scams I’ve see in a long while.

If you’re scratching your head about this one (like I was just a couple of days ago), there’s apparently an underground trade flourishing for toon portraits. WoW players who get so attached to their virtual avatars seek out illustrators that will replicate, say, the glory of their hunter decked out in Season 9 PVP gear.

I can see the allure of immortalizing your toon in digital or real canvas. So did the scammers.

The scheme starts with a request for advance commissions to the tune of thousands of WoW Gold. Once payment is made, the “artist” disappears into thin air.

Why would anyone fall for this Picasso scam? I’ve talked to one victim (who chose to stay anonymous for sheer embarrassment) who said the phony artist looked credible enough, even showing him a website filled with an impressive portfolio.

But after being scammed, the victim checked back at the website and realized that the phony artist was just passing off the work there as his own.

Here are some pretty obvious tips to avoid getting scammed yourself:

• DO NOT trade your WoW Gold before receiving the commission. Follow this and the two other reminders should be unnecessary.
• Request the artist to send you other sample works via e-mail , preferably from an address carrying the domain of the website he showed you.
• If you found the artist via communities like DeviantArt, ask him to confirm his ownership of the showcase account by sending a private message.

Please remember that like WoW Gold buying, WoW Gold commissioning is technically against the Blizzard TOU policy so there is a chance for you to be tagged as engaging in suspicious WoW Gold trading. So if you’re not willing to risk it, just be contented with hi-res screenshots of your toon, OK?

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We gamers tend to be stereotyped as slobbering perverts who melt at the sign of collagen cleavage. And Chinese spammers, in their crude attempts of understanding American culture, probably believed the Hollywood movies that portray us as such.

Their takeaway: Offering sexy pics will get you anywhere with gamers, even selling overpriced shady WoW Gold. Exhibit A is this piece of spam mail from FAST4GOLD and GIVE4POWER. They want you to buy Gold from their dubious-looking websites to score “sexy pics.”

First of all, what has that have to do with anything? What have they got to offer that I won’t get from a quick browse at the FHM or Victoria’s Secret websites? Are these busty illustrations of Jaina and Alexstrasza (I doubt it)?

I’m tempted to run a test order to see what these pictures are but I’m afraid of the phishing viruses contained in them.

When you read the e-mail, there’s an effort to play temptress. Only it fails miserably. First mistake is calling me – or anyone else outside your blood relations – as sweetie. What are you, my wannabe girlfriend and grandmother?

What’s troubling is that FAST4GOLD and GIVE4POWER aren’t the only ones using this sexypic come-on. Dozens of other WoW Gold sellers seem to be offering a range of lewd bonuses like a “chance to chat” or a “webcam appearance.” Oh what sheer desperation!

I can’t help but feel insulted with these obscene offers and even more obscene prices these websites are peddling. You should be too.

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Have you ever sold out a friend? Badmouthed him to the raid leader so your girlfriend could take his spot? Or abandoned a heroic run as soon as you got the drop you wanted?

Well, those traitorous deeds don’t hold a candle to inducting him to the SusanExpress.com referral program. *cough ponzi scheme*

If you truly hate your friend, you’ll send him a link to the notorious site where he will register his e-mail and receive spam for the rest of his WoW-playing lifetime.

Disappointing part: You won’t even get a dollar’s worth of profit for putting your friend in phishing danger. I’ve tested the system and asked their customer service representatives, and they have no automatic way of tracking your referrals.

Your friends will have to reveal your identity to the support agent who will then credit your account with measly points. In 2011, they hold the distinction of being the only referral program with no custom code or link trackers.

For all your effort, you stand to get a whopping 2% off your WoW Gold purchase for a bundle of your pals . How’s that for a grand payoff? To add insult to injury, SusanExpress conveniently rounds off their prices, so you might even end up with a big fat ZERO discount.

But don’t panic! You could aim for the ambitious 3% discount (see chart below) by betraying your whole guild and online friends.

If the sarcasm really flew over your hard, then go all in, be a SusanExpress referral superstar. Mass email the link and beg complete strangers to name drop you after buying from the site. Advertise in forums until you get perma-banned — all in the name of penny savings!

Ah, ponzi schemes don’t get any better than this. All work and universal hatred for you, but all profits for SusanExpress. Now don’t you wish you were born a sly Chinese spammer instead?

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Spammers will come out of the woodwork any day now ahead of Patch 4.2: Rage of the Firelands, and their sole mission in life will be to disrupt your playtime sanity.

WoW Gold is increasing by the minute in trade and general chat. The horde of spam screamers will reach critical mass in the coming weeks as we near the release, so prepare accordingly. Thwart their nasty advances whether in-game or out with these prove spam prevention methods.

IN-GAME PREVENTION

• Report spam. This protocol has been simplified into two steps. Right-click spammer’s name, then choose the “REPORT SPAM” option. You might think it doesn’t work, like how the AFK report button doesn’t work in battlegrounds, but believe me your clicking helps in cleaning up the trash toons littering the game.

• Install a spam blocker. Early this year, I listed the top 5 anti-spam addons that you should use to guard against Ni Hao Gold4U >.< filth. A couple of those I personally know to be still working, but you won’t run out of comparable spam filters at addon heaven Curse.com.

• Ignore and do not respond! Basic psychology teaches us that giving attention to deranged people only excites them even more. Do not respond to whispers offering you the most amazing batch of WoW Gold you can ever imagine. For one, that spam whisperer is lying. Two, you’ll only encourage the behavior and help his work quota for PLAYERS BOTHERED (Believe me; even spam whisperers have performance metrics).

E-MAIL PREVENTION

• Do not use your Battle.net email. Getting spam e-mail is nasty enough as it is, do you want to take on another set of headaches when your Battle.net email gets hacked and your account stolen? It’s safer to use a “dummy” email account (Surprise, it’s easy and free to make one in Yahoo! or Google)

• Beware of fan sites. Choose your fan sites wisely because it’s a known fact that most of them use unsecure programs and codes that are easily hacked by Chinese spammers. That email you provided during registration? They’ll flood it with spam offers so determine first if it’s absolutely necessary for you to rant in that fan site when the official forums will already do.

• Do not buy from in-game sellers. You’d be sniffing Firelands sulfur if you think in-game sellers can be trusted with your email address. If you’re foolish enough to buy from SusanExpress and other known in-game spammers, it’s 100% guaranteed that you’ll be spending the next weekend deleting unwelcome email. Remember the Golden Rule: Once a spammer, always a spammer.

• Block the right keywords. Spam filters are now so advanced that you can target specific senders, header lines and message content from your inbox. But when you do start getting spam (I told you not to trust SSEX and her ilk), spend time analyzing their doozy offers. Look for patterns: Coupon codes, subject phrases, even the often ridiculous names of their senders. Add all these to your filters to stop the flow of WoW Gold spam.

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Since the Winged Guardian mount was released for public consumption and adoration — even mild derision – there’s also been a rise of WoW Gold scams.

Some crafty scammers are offering to sell the lion-eagle mount for in-game Gold, ranging from a few thousand to tens of thousands. This reminds me last year when the release of the Celestial Steed also unleashed a wave of trade scammers.

It doesn’t really matter how much WoW Gold is being asked in exchange for the Winged Guardian, because all these offers are all bogus.

Some especially nasty WoW Gold sellers even plot a double whammy rip-off. Suppose you buy from certain shady Chinese site X, the plan is to then approach you with an offer to spend your newly bought Gold for the Winged Guardian.

You’re giddy as a preschooler on vacation, and agree to the exchange. But you either don’t get the Winged Guardian or receive a code that will then be confiscated by Blizzard because it was bought using a stolen credit card.

I don’t like repeating myself, but this is of utmost importance: Any toons and sellers now offering Winged Guardians for sale or exchange are extremely likely to be associated with a phishing and credit card hacking ring.

Occam’s razor tells us that too-good-to-be-true offers are the result of credit card hackers buying their Winged Guardian codes for zero cost, and selling it for Gold, which can then be sold back to players via website fronts.

So to avoid all the pain of losing your WoW Gold, Winged Guardian and dignity, promptly report any toon and seller that whispers you offering this kind of goods trade.

Blizzard agent Vrakthris also had this to say on what you should be purchasing with your valuable WoW Gold instead. “Any virtual items that can be placed on the Auction House for sale, such as the majority of Trading Card Game pets/mounts or other in-game non-combat pets which are Bind on Equip may be purchased for gold.”

I hope that’s sparkling pony clear.

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For all their shortcomings, Chinese gold sellers are terrific at math. They have that uncanny ability to compute the illicit profits from a phishing campaign, haggle for bot prices, and negotiate the wholesale peddling of hacked accounts – all without using a calculator.

So imagine my surprise when I ran across this spam e-mail from MoreGolds.com, whose Gold prices simply don’t add up.

Let me get this straight. I enter the coupon code and what was once a $16 price tag for 10,000 WoW Gold + game time almost doubles to an outrageous $28? Am I missing something here? Do I actually get ripped off more when using a discount code?

It’s painfully obvious that MoreGolds.com creates bogus coupons than only a Neanderthal would fall for. There’s also no way any of those Gold prices are true. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Not with the retail price of game time at $15 a pop.

Well there is one way I can think of… But it involves you joining their cheat squad. Meaning, you refer their accounts and receive game time and X-53 Touring Rockets under the Recruit-A-Friend program.

That’d be like trading your soul for chump freebies, not to mention exposing your account to the full banhammer wrath of Blizzard.

But hey, don’t listen to me. Maybe you get off on wasting a hundred dollars and thousands of played hours. And if you do, be a buddy and message me now. I’ve got some pretty nice moose pets you’d maybe like to buy. Discount code: SUCKER.

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Only three Gold seller companies out of seven have responded to my emails asking about their sourcing practices in light of the horrible story of prisoners forced into WoW Gold farming.

Unsurprisingly, these are Western-based companies, IGE, WoWGoldPig and EpicToon. In separate e-mails, all three Gold sellers denounced the brutal trade and said their sourcing systems were designed to keep jail-farmed Gold out of their stock.

Four other Gold sellers – IGXE, SusanExpress, HotCataclysm and BankofWoW – have not responded, which suggests.. well, I don’t need to go into details about what it might suggest, do I?

Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if so-called jail-farmed Gold comprised a large portion of the stock sold by sites like HotCataclysm and SusanExpress, their marketing policies (ohai in-game spam!) prove they really don’t care how they make their money as long as they make it.

Anyway, before I bust an artery (or vanish mysteriously as a result of my conspiracy theories), let’s focus on the bright side: A few legitimate sellers do exist, but then if you follow this site at all, you’re already pretty well informed! Below you’ll find impassioned letters that tackle my two main questions:

1. What are your exact sourcing operations?

2. What safeguards you have in place to prevent the purchase of such “dirty Gold”?

“IGE is one of the most mature and trusted Gold selling companies in the world. Over the years, we have worked hard to build a strong network of gamers and guilds which supply our Gold.

We also have ethical checks in place designed specifically to ensure the gold we source do not come from hacked or phished accounts. It’s more costly for us, and considerably more difficult to implement, but doing it any other way simply wouldn’t be right. We’re thankful that over the years more and more customers have chosen, and continue to choose to buy, from companies who make an effort to do things the right way.

The bottom line is that we would never compromise our hard-earned reputation for a quick buck. We have built our business on honesty, and our fans continue to support us because they trust us.

IGE emphatically condemns the practice of forced Gold farming in Chinese prisons, or anywhere else. We are proud to source the majority of our Gold from gamers and renowned guilds outside China. This won’t change, and we invite all players to support us in our mission to keep jail-farmed Gold out of circulation.” - Anthony Hilson, official IGE spokesperson (Respond to him on Facebook and Twitter )

“Hi EGF, first of all, thank you for sending this e-mail. It’s actually been a recent topic of discussion here at the ET blog, expect an impassioned post about it in the coming weeks.

Most bloggers haven’t even bothered doing what you’re doing, which is to attempt to find out which Gold sellers are complicit in these heinous acts. It’s a heck of a lot easier to simply paint us all with one big, broad stroke.

Uninformed, anti-RMT gamers are also feeding the fire, saying that this only proves that the industry is scum. Unsurprisingly, they miss the bigger picture: This is a human rights issue first and foremost.

Needless to say, China doesn’t exactly have a sparkling human rights record, and their jails have long been rumored to be hotbeds of forced labor. Profits go to a few corrupt jail officials and everyone else who allows the practice to continue.

EpicToon is, has never, and will never be in any way associated with this lot of slave drivers. What little of our Gold supply that comes from China, is heavily screened to protect our customers from buying stolen or otherwise unethically obtained Gold.

This screening system involves a frequent review of our suppliers. The bottom line is that we make sure we know where out stock comes from. The vast portion of our gold actually comes from independent players and professional guilds with whom we’ve developed strong ties over the years.

Again, we would like to reassure our customers that our gold isn’t just delivered fast, safe and guaranteed; it’s also 100% ethical.” - MICK JAMES, EpicToon blogger (Respond to him on ET blog )

"I’m gonna level with you, EGF. Those scummy Chinese sellers did it.

I don’t care if they sic their thugs after me, I’m gonna tell it like it is. This happened in a Chinese jail, right, it doesn’t take a genius to know figure out  who buys the Gold after its farmed, does it?

The Pig flat out rejects that jail-farmed crap. Yeah, we’ve been offered a piece o’ the pie quite a few times, but if you’ve ever had a look at some of these Chinese gold sellers’ sites, you can see they’re not on the level, why would I do business with them?.

So where do we get our bacon? Well, we’re lucky to have a bunch o’ loyal farmers who keep the supplies fat and fresh. ‘Course I can’t tell you exactly who they are for privacy and anti-RMT protection (believe me, there’s a bunch of crazies who want us all wiped off the planet) BUT what I can tell you is that none of them are in Chinese prisons. I know this for sure, some of them are good friends o’ mine.

The Pig’s a relatively small op, but that’s how I like it, I actually get to talk to our suppliers, you know, like they’re real people not random robots that deliver the goods when I push a button. Customer places an order, and more often than not I’m the one pickin’ up the phone and placing orders directly with the supplier, and I only speak two languages, English and Bad English, no Mandarin, savvy?

Much as I want to punch those Chinese sellers… repeatedly… in the face, I also feel sorry for them. See, they have to play dirty to keep up with us top dog (pig?) sellers. Doesn’t excuse their sins one bit though. Only shows you how low they can go to earn an easy buck." - NICK GARDNER, WoWGoldPig Head Pig (Respond to him on WGP blog , Facebook and Twitter )

EGF Thoughts

There you have it, three letters that seem to sum up the strategy of Gold sellers – at least the decent ones – which is to choke out demand for jail-farmed Gold so it dies a natural death.

It will take a lot of re-education to teach gamers that price is only one factor to consider. If there’s one good thing to come out of the original story it’s that it sheds light on the horrible practice, and it’s just a shame that the same article didn’t actually bother to find out who’s really behind it all.

Quality of service and ethical sourcing should also be taken into account when choosing a Gold seller, that’s why this site exists. Simple as.

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