We’re all used to getting spam tells in our games offering to sell us gold. We’re used to seeing gold farmers in games, seeing ads on the internet for gold. Yesterday – I had a new situation occur. A gold farmer actually got my MSN screenname and tried to have a conversation with me. A quick Google search for “ipssuppliers” ended up with many results from people who’d been IMed by similar screennames with the same offer. I led “her” on a bit to try to get more information but I thought this was hilarious.
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(16:47:48) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com hi! how are u?
(16:47:59) Cuppycake hi there, good thanks – who is this?
(16:48:42) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com i am anne from the IPS company
(16:48:48) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com nice to meet u
(16:49:00) Cuppycake Nice to meet you – what exactly is the IPS company?
(16:51:34) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com IPS company do the service for wow players,we offer free lvling service from lvl 60 to 70 chars.we will pay payment for ur lvl 70 chars per week .
(16:51:44) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com we added u in the wow realm forum , so we guess u are a wow player.
(16:51:52) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com ok?:P
(16:52:28) Cuppycake Not interested
(16:52:39) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com oh
(16:53:15) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com u don’t like to play WOW game in ur free time?
(16:53:40) Cuppycake I love to play the WoW game in my free time, but I don’t need a powerleveler. =) I level my own characters.
(16:54:19) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com ok! i understand u
(16:54:27) Cuppycake How much is it?
(16:54:39) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com the deal is free.don’t worry
(16:54:52) Cuppycake Free?
(16:55:00) Cuppycake You’ll level my character from 60-70 without me paying anything?
(16:55:16) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com if u rent ur lvl 70 char to us ,u may get 1000g or 20$ per week.
(16:55:43) Cuppycake I don’t get it.
(16:56:58) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com no. u can get it back.
(16:57:13) Cuppycake Ah, what do you use my character for?
(16:57:51) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com we rent our clients’wow acc one week or so.after one week u get it back again.
(16:58:03) Cuppycake Yes, but what do you use it for?
(16:58:53) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com we use it to hit monsters and get the golds ,then pay payment or offer lvling service.ok?
(16:59:23) Cuppycake Isn’t that against Blizzard’s EULA?
(17:00:07) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com no!our service don’t break the law.
(17:00:36) Cuppycake So my character wouldn’t get banned?
(17:02:27) ipssuppliers8@hotmail.com yes.it doesn’t get banned.we have IP proxy
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So there you have it. This company will rent your character for free for a week or two and farm gold with it. Of course they promise it won’t be banned. Hilarious when you consider the whole reason they ‘rent’ characters instead of leveling their own is so their accounts aren’t banned and ours are. Nice. But hey, I might get $20/week =P
(There was more to this, which was me trying to offer this person $20 to talk with me more candidly about their job. It ended with ‘her’ stating that she couldn’t talk about personal stuff at work and winking at me. I hope to get a message in the next couple of days…)
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
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The sad part is that there must be a bunch of people who respond to this and take them up on their offer… and don’t change their password at any point. They probably have a huge farm of accounts that they play when they figure the account holder isn’t on.
Wow, way to go Cuppy! You even got a wink hehe.
I’m interested to see if you can dig any more info out of them, tell them you want in and can provide at least 20 other accounts that you know the password to. Something ridiculous that will make them take the bait.
wow cuppy that’s hilarious. We had a few of those end up in my wow guild back in the day at numerous times and a few foreigners were weren’t gold farmers but it was always fun to talk to them
(and boot them if they were farmers)
Even if the account isn’t banned, it often results in the “renter” vendoring all of your gear or disenchanting all of the gear and selling the resulting void crystals or large prismatic shards. They then sell all of the gold produced from this effort to players looking to buy gold.
Wow, that is incredible. I had no idea they were so aggressive. What a ridiculous scam, good work Cuppy.
Shocking! … Actually, okay, I pretty much expect stuff like this anymore.
I admit, its a fairly entertaining scam. Shame for people who fall for it though.
Greed before common sense? Shame ON the people who take this offer up. Need money? Get a job!
Isn’t leveling your character supposed to be fun? If you aren’t having fun, you are doing it wrong!
I’m currently having a talk with this “company.” I’m like “Isn’t that against the EULA” and they’re like “sure, but we’ve been doing it for 3 years.” It looks like they take their “name” from a list: Cuppy had “anne” and I had “alina”. Interesting thing is after I talked with “alina” and told “her” I didn’t have a lvl 70 and we said “bye”, she reintroduced herself and forgot that I didn’t have a lvl 70. hehehe