Why aren't money spammers being perma-banned?

Discussion in 'Gotham City (General Gameplay)' started by Magnificent, Oct 12, 2019.

  1. Magnificent Loyal Player

    You can see the accounts they are using to send money to their mules. Why aren't those accounts being banned as well as just the low-level spammers? Why don't we have some sort of ingame moderator during peak gaming times that can shut these lugnuts down? Heck, I'll volunteer to do it an hour or so each week night.
    • Like x 2
  2. CrescentMoon Well-Known Player

    DC would've had to upgrade their code for that to be the case. Back during the OG SM's, I remember one of the GM's stating that they can't track mail's that are no longer in the actual mail of a player. As in you need the sent/and or inbox message for them to verify the transfer. I believe someone else 1-2 months back posted about an issue they had on the forums as well regarding this technicality when they needed help. One reason I'm cautious letting other people hold my money on their alts is because a friend of mine got scammed for 100mil using this loophole when I thought one of my other friends at the time could hold it (me and the original cash holder were both going premium back then). The new holder of the cash said DC's mail system lost it when he mailed it to his alt but because he deleted the mail on both ends (including the sent tab that nooone else I'm aware of even cares about) customer support couldn't verify it and he refused to pay for the 100mil he either had or lost, so I had to reimburse the amount myself and just block him, which was sad at the time because we were fb friends, but I got over it. Funny enough, he's in one of the most "validated" leagues now, if you catch that reference.
    • Like x 1
  3. TechWarrior0329 Steadfast Player

    The problem is the way the game is set up. For all anyone knows as those spammers get reported some one may be banning them... but here is what can and probably does happen next... (oh and I'll give a but of background to support my "theory" first)

    So okay several years back I found myself temporarily BANNED from the game. Now without going into a huge amount of detail I requested some details on why this occurred and was sent an email to my Yahoo account explaining. "SUPPOSEDLY" one of my alts had used some macro that was a TOS violation and earned me a 3 day ban along with a warning never to do that again. Interestingly the alt named was basically a drone I used for added storage. I never really Played the game with it at all. it sat in the watchtower and I logged it on once a day or so to read its email and grab the items I attached and then stick them in its bank until I needed them on an ALT I actually used to play the game. LOL never changed a thing I was doing with that character and have never been banned again... BUT

    All I did to get around the ban was create a new F2P account so I could get back into the game and contact my friends know what was going on and then simply played the game with them using THAT account until that ban lifted.

    IN other words even when they BAN an account (temporary or permanent) it does not stop anyone for simply creating a new account and being back in the game in less than 1 hour. Probably way less. It's been a while since my "BAN" took place but I am pretty sure I used the exact same email account to create that new account and I KNOW for a fact that I used the same Credit card to buy some stuff and go from F2P to Premium for those three days.

    Fact is the game is not set up to detect computer IDs to ban anyone on a more truly permanent basis. Ban that spammer's computer and he needs to go buy a new one or He can not get into the game. Same thing with using credit card info as a way to ban. Heck I don't know about anyone else but I personally have a Google Email address, a Yahoo email address and a Microsoft Email address and tot be totally honest no idea how many others exist these days so anyone in game could easily have multiple account and no one would have a clue they were all the same individual. So a spammer could have one account banned for life and still have 3,4 or god knows how many more already in place and be back selling gold within minutes on another account.
    • Like x 1
  4. Reinheld Devil's Advocate

    I always heard they could do an "IP BAN", which maybe could be an issue depending on how likely your ISP was to give you a new one (I know most businesses have fixed IPs and even my home Comcast IP has not changed for a year). However, I agree that short of banning the IP or hardware, account or toon banning does nothing. I'd go one further and say that it actually increases the problem.....more on that below....That's why whenever the 'spammer' issue comes up I like to ask 2 things. "why not an account wide 'ignore' list?" and "why are we banning the gold spamming free/premium accounts and not the ones holding the gold?"

    An account wide ignore (meaning I ignore you on my toon A, my toon B also has you ignored) would help decrease the frustration we get from the spammers as we wouldn't need to re-ignore whenever we come in on a new toon. It's a band-aid, but would give immediate relief. I think with them banning only certain toons or accounts, the sellers are forced to set up new ones....which means we are forced to ignore again the next day. Give us a better ignore mechanism and let them spam all day....we won't see them.

    Banning the 'barker' accounts does nothing to solve the issue...They are at best premium...maybe F2P depending on where they post their messages. They would not be able to send money via mail....that has to be handled by some 'mule' account which would be legendary. You could find some of these accounts very easy by just doing an undercover purchase of gold and see who mails it to you. Unless they are giving away $15 of profit per account, those sellers are NOT disposable and would likely be around for the month at least. However, unless the sellers are very stupid, those accounts would likely not have much gold on them...because they would be easy to find this way. The ones holding the billions of gold, the 'bank' accounts likely send gold over a few 100 million at a time....use that up....then send some more as needed. Those are the accounts we need to find and sink, and I'd think that if you knew one or to of the 'mule' accounts and actively monitored their mail, you'd quickly be able to see who's sending them 100's of millions in mail every day or so. Banning a 'bank' account would take billions out of the economy and likely put a noticeable hurt on their supply. Would it shut them down? Doubtful. Would it make them reconsider posting 100's of messages an hour making them easier to put a sting on? I'd like to think so...yes.

    Reinheld
  5. CrescentMoon Well-Known Player

    One issue is that they have a minimum purchase amount that's already at ~$8-10. If they increase it to $15, DC would have to basically pay for legendary for another account in order to just find a mule account that has the temporary money. In addition to the price of even finding out, depending on your payment method, they require I.D. verification, so unless DC wants to use Bitcoin I think it was (which could be taken away if they wanted), they'd need a lot of staff as each one would be blacklisted after use. You also have to consider multiple accounts holding the money's/deleted toons/reused name's etc. that would complicate the tracking down process. And then having to do that entire process for 4+ sites, each time getting harder as if any of them are smart, when 1 site would start having problems, they'd communicate with another to fortify ahead of time, possibly in exchange for temporary funds as they recover if they did indeed get wiped. DC isn't even staff'd enough to do basic trade chat monitoring for profanity, let alone launching an investigation/sting operation big enough to take down all the gold sites.
    • Like x 1
  6. Nogreen Active Player

    Yea, why dont they ban those spammers?
    Sure we can use ignore and a month later when we make a new toon the same names are still spamming...

    Maybe if they start selling ingame money on their Daybreak store this would go away.
  7. Reinheld Devil's Advocate

    First off...I'm not sure that DC would have to pay anything for an account in their own system. I'm pretty sure Mepps, NerdOfPrey and the others don't subscribe....I'd guess it's a spiff of working for DBG.

    Second, I'm 1000% sure that if they needed some 'stealth' accounts to do the buying they could find volunteers to do that for them and relay the info....I for one have thrown my hat in the ring to go undercover, as long as I'm not going to get strung up for 'buying' from a gold seller. I have all those things like ID, CC...etc...and would not care if I were blacklisted from a gold seller...assuming they know it was me that turned them in. Except for this purpose I never planned on buying gold anyway.

    Third, you are missing the point of the exercise. I'm not thinking that they would NOT scramble once they got hit...I'm counting on it. I'm assuming they'd harden their defenses, like maybe not broadcasting their info everywhere 1000X a day or raising prices or whatever it would take to keep the 'sting' from hitting them again. And I think you are over estimating the organization of these entities...I'm guessing there is not a bat-phone set up between the 2 'corporate offices' of the different companies where they would communicate "well...looks like Johnny law is on to us, see....we've got to take it on the lamb, see"(in my best Edward G Robinson voice). I'd guess if one company got hit they'd keep it to themselves and protect themselves...leaving the other companies to be low hanging fruit. BTW...this assumes they are not all actually the same company....which they could be.

    Fourth, it wouldn't require constant monitoring, like watching a live feed like trade chat would be. The gold is sent by mail. Mail is a system on the back end. Once a 'mule' is ID'd (and I could get them one today if they wanted to start....I'll go buy some right now if deputized), you could look at any transactions INTO that toons account before they hit his mailbox. When one comes in from someone with 200 million attached, you found one of the bank toons....kill it and any associated toons...kill the mule that sent the money to me and any associated toons there. I'd guess the supply goes on daily as you would not want to keep too much on the 'mule' toon. That would put a bite on the sellers systems and take billions...maybe tens of billions depending on the 'bank' you get...out of the economy. It will not shut anything down, but it will send a message that something is going to be done vs the nothing being done today.

    Reinheld
  8. Reinheld Devil's Advocate

    Good lord no. More money in the economy is not the answer. Think about it. If DBG puts '10 mil cash' into the store at 3 bucks...what does that do? It adds more money that eventually can be transferred into the spammers hands....where do you think they get all their money, from running content and collecting 3K per mission?....selling dropped items to Vendors? No. They get cash from us...the other users, either via selling some high ticket item in the broker they farmed by collecting stabilizers or directly by buying cash from users on their sites at 10x less than they sell it for. All you'll do by adding more cash is make the sellers lower their prices and probably amp up the spamming as they scramble to sell their now diminishing valued cash. The only ones who win here are DBG as I'm sure some would buy the legit cash from them vs going to the sellers....but not everyone. The biggest losers are not the spammers, it's us, the players...moreso the honest players would wouldn't by the cash from either source and would be left in the dust when 10 million won't even buy a single exo material.

    Reinheld
  9. Minie Well-Known Player

    So basically what I've read in this thread is, this game (DCUO) wasn't launched with tech to properly ban people like bots aka they can't.

    I've also heard in the past that they let glitchers/hackers off easily, so basically they can't ban the bots but the people they can ban, they don't.

    So it's a sticky situation for the players (us),because we have to combat the glitchers/hackers Plus combat the bots that grow by the day, with no reason to believe it will ever be fixed?
  10. TITAN ephemeral Loyal Player

    to be honest even if they did a scammer would just run 2 systems...one constantly setting up randomly generated but functioning dc accounts....the other would spew spam...by the time the spamming one was stopped and blocked the other one would be running with a fresh account fresh rando toon...ready to spamride again...not saying dont try....they have ways of breaking or opening locks too...would never say just keep your front door open then because what can you do??!!
  11. CrescentMoon Well-Known Player

    1. I never said they'd have to pay for an account on their own system. I'm referring to a minimum purchase amount on the actual gold site. You can't just buy $1-3 worth. If they increased it to $15 that you had to spend as a minimum, you or whoever else is "going undercover" is paying for the legendary of the next account.

    2. And they will thank you for your business.

    3. Everything you listed is not a realistic response to if a mule account got hit. There's no point in lowering advertising if it's free regardless. If you're selling, you're selling and lowering how often you shout doesn't change that people know about your site already. And depending on if that mule even has more money than what was ordered, they wouldn't even lose anything other than $15 for another legendary account, which if you wanted to get technical since this whole process is illegal anyway, they could get for free. And if you were unaware, they're all Asian, if I remember correctly, all Chinese specifically. Which is the worst group in terms of trying to fight off for various reasons.

    4. Your 4th point is broken if mails are deleted. As I stated in my post, last time I heard, they can't track mail's properly. In addition to GMs' previous statements about needing mails in game, doing trade's in game and mail from what I've seen on PC via combat log, they don't even show the other party in a trade window or the subject for the mail. And, even assuming they did have access to more information than we do (which they should), any form of illegal items/cash has always been scrambled across multiple toons, accounts, ip's, league halls, and or broker purchases. The same way you'd volunteer to help catch them, they'd just pay people to help smuggle whatever they had. Assuming they even had the means to track it, you'd take a risk on false-flagging a bunch of people that would be middle men'ing that don't even know it. I could be a mule for a gold site and get money from the source on one of my toons and shuffle it through 3-4 leaguemates that they pass back to me on another psn. And all I have to say is "I don't trust the mail system because it's glitched before" and now those 3-4 people are completely unknowing of being in the process of smuggling and think they're just helping me move money over to a bank account on a spare psn or pc acc. Or I just tell them I just want the money on my alt but I got stuck at a loading screen or dc'd and had to relog and it took me a second to get back in the game when really I was signing into a completely different pc account. You can't go around mass ip/device ban'ing people that are involved because you have no proof of intention or context for what was going on. The same way speed hackers have people who defend and hide them in game, same with anyone who has exploited items/cash, you can be sure there's a system in place for the gold sites that minimize any losses as well as disguises transactions.
  12. Proxystar #Perception

    You can't ban IP addresses for that reason, without knowing whether it's static or dynamic. If it's dynamic you can end up perma banning innocent people using the same ISP.

    They'd probably be easily able to tell of course based on the IP log whether it's always the same IP address being used.

    The best way to address it is to have some active live chat moderation, you advertise, intant ban hammer, they'll give up eventually when they know the effort doesn't reap enough reward.
    • Like x 1
  13. TechWarrior0329 Steadfast Player

    Reinheld makes an excellent point. Take a look at the messages the spammers put out... Sure they are selling in game cash but normally in the exact same ad they are telling any player interested where to go to sell in game cash to the web site so it has cash to sell... You really didn't think there were thousands of poor helpless players in game chained to some chair in a dark room just playing the game over and over to get cash the web site could sell? DID YOU?

    The player base for the game is just as responsible for the spammers as the SPAMMERS are 1) if not one in game ever went to those sites as laid out real money to but "fake" in game cash just how long do you think kit would be before all those spammers were on some other game? and 2) if no players in game ever sold those web sites the In game cash they turn right around and sell back to other players .. they wouldn't have enough in game cash to do anything with.

    Not saying the spammers are not a pain and should be gotten rid of but OUR player base provides the means for them to exist and provides the players so desperate to have the special "aura" or whatever that they will do anything and PAY anything to get it. Hey it happens in game legally... Still chuckle thinking about a guy I teamed with years ago that admitted he was worried how much trouble he'd be in with his wife when she got home and discovered he'd spent $150 US DOLLARS on Booster Bundle to get a special aura that MIGHT drop if you were lucky. As long as players in game are willing to spend ridiculous amounts of in game and /or REAL CASH the spammers will find a way to stay on line and sell them what they need.
    • Like x 1
  14. TheLastSuperman Well-Known Player

    Well we can assume this much without being made into a you know what as the saying goes...
    • The games runs on a server.
    • The game has a database.
    • They depend heavily on logs.Thus when you report they review the chat logs.
    Let's whip up a cron job with a query that simply identifies enormous amounts of money transfers or items being traded/sold for $. No matter if they can't track something once it's left a certain player none of that matters if you run a query to find data on NEW items or money on accounts as-of today etc. Heck you could run a query to compare $ per account from the day before to the day after (today) and if it differs heavily flag it for review. Have it log how many tc's are opened per day... if it shows someone opening 2k tc's then Houston, we have a problem! There's so many ways in conjunction or separately that you could use to easily identify this horse hockey.

    NOW... Have that data compiled into info a GM can review then they can easily identify spammers.
    • Player X had 51mil yesterday according to log data, player X has 2bil today according to log data(and query). Some items now costs that much if not more, so make sure if this is legitimate or not.
    • *GM investigates this, sees the money came from thin air. Chat log records indicate NO trade was made the day before.
    • Safe to assume w/o them being made into a you know what too, that based on common sense something is amiss and fishy at best.
    I mean a database that relies on log data (or database data actually) can't be checked??? This is why when there is a new major DLC downtime is expected to last for 8hours or more - it's called running backups on the database information.

    Sooooooooo with all that being said I've still yet to see a good explanation for why we can't identify problematic users exploiting the economy in sheer blatant fashion and ban them accordingly. No one on staff can whip up a SQL query to do this? You MUST BE KIDDING ME!

    *If you lovely charming forthright people would +1 like this post perhaps after so many likes Mepps would care to clarify how this ^ wouldn't work or can't OR perhaps we'll hear something along the lines of "we have no plans for this now" or similar as that's the scape goat phrase we all know and love. Evidently something is above someones pay grade here I truly don't know how else to put it, it can or can't be done for THIS reason plain and simple and unless I'm missing something I'm at a loss. I was also at a loss when "The 400" returned and were able to keep all the items and money they made from tc glitching... but then again if we do the math that's 400 accounts @$15 subscription costs per month for a loss of $6k/month and a yearly loss in revenue of $72,000 so now we know why they were let back in. I could continue to explain how that lead to the economy becoming worse for most players... the fact the new OP collection prices are being controlled by those with billions and setting prices and all that but I'll spare you the details and let you realize what I've meant by all this.
    • Like x 1
  15. Reinheld Devil's Advocate

    1. If they are setting up a new account every time they hit 15 bucks, I doubt they are making anything whether they are getting it 3 bucks a pop or 15. Your assumption takes into account they they know that the guy who just spent 15 bucks is also going to get the account they just shipped his gold from...banned. While I'd like them to be operating under that level of paranoia, I doubt it is indeed the case.
    2. They will, and as long as it's the last transaction from that 'bank' account, I'll smile and wave it bye-bye.
    3. Ok...so if a drug dealer is operating on a corner in full view of everyone so the dealer get scooped up easily, then they roll on the mule so he gets scooped up as well as his supplier....you believe the'll go right back out and deal as blatently as before? Well... maybe at some point sure, but I'd bet they are more selective of which corners they stand on and who they broadcast 'got drugs here!' to at least for a while. Not sure how you believe the accounts moving the gold are free, but yes they would indeed lose at least the 1 account and anything stored in it's bank/inventory. How big is that hit? Not sure...I'm not a gold seller, but the stuff has to sit somewhere. As far as them being Chinese, yeah I kind of figured that, but no one is talking about suing them...I'm talking about shutting down their account and taking their goods in game, which DBG has full right to do regardless of where they are.
    4. The mails go through the DBG system. At some point there is a DB of some sort in which that piece of mail is a set of 1's and 0' that translates out to "Toon X sends Toon Y an email with $$$ of gold attached". As soon as they know Toon Y is the mule, they should be able to put in a job that records who sent who what email. I'd guess the 'bank' would probably be the only one sending the mule 100's of millions in cash, but even if it's a player who is selling gold to a mule for RW cash, heck...ban him too he's also breaking the TOS, maybe even a person running an exploit to generate money or goods. What you are talking about is trying to go in AFTER the fact and look at mail. Trying to track mail that was already sent is not the same as intercepting it on the way. And yeah, gold and items are likely spread about, but at some point it's sitting still in a bank, then moved to a mule toon. I never said you'd have to catch them all....just some....enough to make them slow down a bit.

    Now...unless either of us work for DBG or the gold sellers (I'm a bit suspicious of how much you seem to know about their inner workings), neither of us know exactly how the money moves but a few educated guesses and just knowing how the game works should make a couple of my suppositions accurate. Out of which other than the loss of my $8 (if that's the current minimum) and some hours of DB query coding to set up the mail trap on the back end, I'm not sure how you think it's not worth pursuing? Personally if they threw me some replays or something I'd just eat the $8 I spent contacting the seller.

    BTW...as far as them being to look at the mail once deleted, they do have some ability. I had a problem a while back where my mail came in from some failed auctions and I tried to claim my attachments immediately on opening the mailbox. I opened the mail and thought I grabbed the attachment and the mail was even able to delete (it normally won't with an attachment still onboard). I had 3 mails an on the 3rd one I realized I did not hear the 'inventory' noise of something being added and looked....I saw that none of the 3 items were there. I left the last mail in the inbox...tried some things... but eventually opened a ticket. The CS rep was able to see that I had 3 mails that failed attachment delivery, but they could not see the attachments. (Funny enough they were all OG smoke and Nimbuses....I kid I kid). I let them know what they were and they had them inserted into my inventory. Now I know that's the not the same, but they CAN see some of what is going on, even after the fact....even when they weren't doing anything ahead of time as they would if doing what I propose.

    Reinheld
  16. Reinheld Devil's Advocate

    While I'd agree that would work, that's a lot of GMs sitting around 24 hours a day monitoring a lot of chats. Even at a minimum, you've got 2 sides of LFG/Trade+Gotham/Metro/CurrentDLCOutdoor/WT-HOD shout channels That's not even including the 10 safehouses with their own shouts. Not sure how many they could monitor at once, but if one guy can do all of those, you are talking about 3-5 full time employees on shifts. It would be nice if we'd have the player based GMs again, unpaid, who'd have ban rights but that could lead to abuse of power...which is a different but potentially worse problem.

    But yeah, the IP ban issue would have it's own problems....Just saying I had always heard it was an option they were able to use. Wasn't saying it's a good option.

    Reinheld
  17. CrescentMoon Well-Known Player

    1. That assumption is based on common sense. If you operated for months/years w/o concern and that mule gets randomly banned, you're going to run a sweep of the most recent accounts and rule out anyone who's been a consistent/repeated buyer (which the majority of that clientel would be). You'd have to purposely let the business run for a decent time period and mix in your analytics with the rest of the customers for it not to work, and if you're waiting that long, they're making the profit you'd probably be taking from them.

    2. And you'll have another 'bank' account made. Might as well be some of the people in denial on the forums trying to add every bot in chat to ignore knowing good and well they're wasting their time but grasping desperately at some method to try to limit their iritation. And if you pick the wrong site at the wrong time, as I have been told, some of them don't stop selling even when they don't have stock and create a backlog of orders to fill for when they get the money. Which means you just got scammed for $15 or whatever you paid trying to go undercover with no toon name to show for it. And if you think paypal is getting your money back, you can google search the complaints from paypal saying there was little they could do.

    3. That's the difference. Selling Gold online isn't the same as a drug dealer on the street. The drug dealer actually has money/funds on him and is not easily replaced seeing as the population of people who would be willing or knowledgeable to sell drugs is already limited. Not to mention the drug dealer is actively trying to hide his activity so figuring out how he got caught is a problem that needs to be solved to avoid the next one, otherwise you're just losing product if he gets picked up before he can give you the money. Meanwhile intermediate bank accounts that only have temporary funds or bots that just shout are easily replaced. You also don't have to worry about either of those turning in higher level people in the works like you would a drug dealer. And those accounts aren't hiding anything, they're blatantly in the open. One of the gold sites has used the exact same toon for over 2 years. They don't care. It's not unexpected, and if handled properly, it's not even a profit loss the next time you see it happening.

    4. I believe the accounts COULD be free, because me and several other people know how to upgrade an account to Legendary or Premium w/ a net cost of $0. The thousands of gear boxes that were in the broker that I reported weeks ago could've been one method of doing so.

    5. The accounts aren't even level 20, what goods do you expect to find in the bank/inventory?? They sell cash, they don't sell og plasmics or 99 cache's or materials. You have cash that could or couldn't be there, and that's it. And an account that's worth little to nothing. That's like banning a f2p account that's going to come back in 5min because there are ways around ip and device bans that speed hackers found out over 2 years ago. Given the current situation, DC can't touch them which is why threads like this get largely ignored, you're trying to catch smoke with your bare hand.

    6. That line of code doesn't exist. If it did, they would've been able to wipe all the items and cash from people who did every exploit in the past including the years old auction house glitch and the newer time capsule exploit. And yet trading and mailing worked perfectly fine. Worthless alt accounts banned with the main accounts they mailed to untouched. And if they had detailed messaging like that, there wouldn't be cases of people scamming Customer Support for free og plasmics or a 2nd amazon fury 3 ring saying you didn't get the first one. You wouldn't have cases of people were flagged as accounts for their money to be wiped and them mailing it elsewhere stopped it from happening. Even in the latest case where Daybreak felt the tc exploit stole thousands of dollars from them, which would've been the prime time to use said tracking if it existed, they didn't. It either does not exist, or even with thousands of dollars on the line, they are too lazy to go through the hassle of utilizing it.

    7. I don't work for the gold sites, but I have spoken to them on skype out of curiosity way back, I have friends who have sold to them or bought from them for years. Any league that you know has a lot of people that are either rich/billionaires or have a lot of members with 400+ sp, has someone in the league that has interacted with the gold sites at some point. And because actual people are there on the other side, you can actually have conversations with some of the middle men like how me and you are talking now. You were correct earlier in them being a flipping company. They buy from players at a cheaper rate than what they sell at. So if you see idk $100 for 850mil, that means a player sold them 850mil for somewhere around $75-85 more than likely. Someone sells to the sites cheap, the sites drop their prices but still stay at a profit, the playerbase has to drop to offer a competitive rate, and the cycle continues. They're the same as the people in game who buy and then re-sell psn codes for a higher rate, but they have the business integrity/reputation there. Because of how they work, there's actually been players including 2 that I used to know who decided to quit for the most part and made their own site to sell cash and started advertising in trade/ps4 communities because they had enough to startup and take orders.

    8. You had one mail left in your mail slot which gives them a time period in your log to look at. You're going to have the in game "You have new mail" message to look for. Accepting the attachment has a "person gained 0 cash" message in the combat log. You can see it if you have cash changes displayed, but as far as I'm aware, I couldn't find a combat log written for the actual item you would've gotten. If you had 3 of the "person gained 0 cash" in your combat log right after mail message, that would tell them 3 mail's got sent that you did the retrieve function on, but they would be unable to tell what was in said mails. Possibly if there was a way to track inventory management, they would know nothing got added to your account, so it bugged out.
  18. TheLastSuperman Well-Known Player

    The duping also affected the economy, I remember when Phoenix was 200mil then all of a sudden a flood of them 50mil a pop, no ones money on this game is clean simply based on the fact we've bought or purchased something that interacted with the tainted money in one way or another. If we can't fix what's been done to-date, as that would cause a riot in a sense peoples money being adjusted (I'd quit lol) we could at least implement something moving forward. The cron/query could also be used to identify common bot/gold site names in chat and instantly ban the account (temp ban 2-3 days first in-case was a player talking about a site etc but after 3 strikes of temp bans, perma ban as a ruleset).

    All I know is something better can be done, some more thought put into this.
  19. Magnificent Loyal Player


    In order to send the advertised amount of ingame cash they have to be a member or else they're spending a ton in escrows for each transaction.

    If the devs really want to bring the hammer down on these folks they could easily roll up a new character then contact them about buying a million or so of ingame cash then ban the account that handles the transaction. Any account giving out that much money cannot be a free account, thus they are spending at least $5.00 for a mule account (no idea how much escrow access costs but the minimum amount of SC someone can purchase is the $5 package) to transfer the money. Also, once the mule account is identified they should be able to then monitor their mail to see whom they are getting money from (even if the emails are being deleted, they should be able to monitor it in real time to see the email as it hits).

    When the money bug was in full effect they suspended accounts for people involved in it. IIRC, that involved mailing money as well.
  20. TechWarrior0329 Steadfast Player


    Use a bit of logic.... The spam bots can be F2P or spend a whole $5 and go Premium and just set up shop anywhere and advertise. So a player decides they want oh let's just say 20 million in cash and goes to the web site and buys it for how ever much real cash is required. That player let's the site know which of their alts they want to be given the cash and than a drop off is arranged to deliver that cash to them.

    The web site can have a hundred or more spammers out there advertising but every one of them can be F2P or spend a whole $5 to be Premium. All the Web Site needs is one or two Legendary members in game to deliver the cash. The F2P deliver the message while the Legendary hand out the in game cash and since THOSE players never violate the TOS buy advertising they are involved in selling that in game cash so they never get caught and then banned. The spammer gets a ban and just creates a whole new account to start spamming again and those "BAGMEN" just keep dropping off cash to customers that buy it.

    Just makes sense to me.. A couple guys subscribe so they CAN have that much cash on hand and hand it off at no risk while the spam bots shell out no cash and just keep finding a new identity any time they get caught and banned.