Biggest MMO heists and scams

Hello everyone, have you ever been scammed? Have you ever trusted someone who then stole from you? If you have, then I have something that might interest you, if you haven’t, look out, because here are a few of the most elaborate schemes and scams that have ever hit the mmo world. I hope you enjoy this, be on the lookout.
(Everything that is in this article real, these are real frauds, NONE of the contact information here is legit, I hold no responsibility if you use it.)
I’ll start off with the smallest, to the biggest. So the first one is the phishing scam, let’s face it, it’s low class, low level, and almost none of us believe in it. It’s an email phishing fraud, almost everyone gets one of these every year, well, I get them monthly.
ONCE AGAIN, THIS IS A SCAM, NONE OF THE CONTACT INFO IS LEGIT/REAL, DON’T USE IT!!

Greetings,
An investigation of your World of Warcraft account has found strong evidence that the account in question is being sold or traded. As you may not be aware of,this conflicts with Blizzard's EULA under section 4 Paragraph B which can be found here:
WoW -> Legal -> End User License Agreement
and Section 8 of the Terms of Use found here:
WoW -> Legal -> Terms of Use
The investigation will be continued by Blizzard administration to determine the action to be taken against your account. If your account is found violating the EULA and Terms of Use, your account can, and will be suspended/closed/or terminated.
In order to keep this from occurring, you should immediately verify that you are the original owner of the account.
To verify your identity please visit the following webpage:
Blizzard staff will verify your account information submitted in two days, please do not modify your account information during this time . It will not affect your game uptime.If you are unable to successfully verify your password . using the automated system, please contact Billing & Account Services at 1-800-59-BLIZZARD (1-800-592-5499) Mon-Fri, 8am-8pm Pacific Time or at . Account security is solely the responsibility of the account holder. Please be advised that in the event of a compromised account, Blizzard representatives typically must lock the account. In these cases the Account Administration team will require faxed receipt of ID materials before releasing the account for play.
Regards,

Account Administration
Blizzard Entertainment

Now as realistic as it seems, an experienced eye can quickly see the fake. Let me break this down for you. These messages (the real ones) are sent by the battle.net server, they use a template. Now if you take a closer look at the message I’ve got, you’ll see quite a few mistakes, missing or extra spaces in this case. Plus, blizzard uses as its domain.
Beware, WoW is not the only game that has phishers, if you get a suspicious email talking about your account, contact the support of the game, from the original game site, and block the spammers.
Almost everyone knows Runescape, and its most feared enemy, the RSBot2. Well, I have something to tell you, if your runescape account was hacked, it was because of the bot.
It all started when two of the developers at powerboat.org wanted to ruin the bot and sell it as a premium bot, as there were too many botters, and very little contributors. Another developer did not agree to that, so shortly after the team split. But what he did not know was the fact that a now former admin Jacmob switched the download link on their site to an infected version of the bot with an implemented password stealer. That did not end here…
Arbiter, the second developer has infected all the premium scripts with the same password stealer, thus scamming his own customers. It was not instant, the users of the bot may have used the infected version for quite some time, the virus was only used on the day that Runescape re-launched the Wilderness and Free-Trade, a lot of accounts were scammed earning Jacmob and Arbiter thousands of dollars.
Those two have collected over 19 Billion GP (Runescape currency, Gold Points) and around 3500/14000 accounts, summing up to over 20,000 USD, a true nightmare for botters. Jagex lawyers have already started working on the case, and all of their personal information will be added on powerbot.org.
And here is an independent report from

War of the Botters. Powerbot Vs Rs buddy The explanation.

Currently in the runescape botting world there is a crisis. Accounts are being hacked, valuables are being lost.
Many people are wondering WHAT THE HELL HAS HAPPENED? WHY DID THIS GO TO S**T SO QUICKLY? and i have answers.
I have been taking part in this project over the last few months, i have now looked at the consequences of what i have done and have
realised that its not worth it anymore.

Heres how it started

This has been planed out months ago, we started to talk about it in may 2010 but only started working on it in July.
The two main Developers of the project were fed up with the powerbot community, Jacmob was having arguments with Paris about how the
site was going downhill, there was too many botters and not enough contributers. Jacmob was fed up with this and decided to try and
buy out powerbot. The amount that jacmob offered was high but paris would just not take it, this led to arguments within the staff
and the replacement of many staff members. Jacmob decided to stay on as the developer, but always intended to resign sometime
within the next 6 months. Soon after this, the old RSBot.org domain was bought out by jagex which led to more arguments within the
staff. During this time Rsbot2 was being developed. Many of the staff took 2 sides, Most with Paris and the others with Jacmob (Arbiter & Toshi). The Project was started soon after this, originally it was started only to piss of Paris and show that the website would be nothing without them, however soon after this other factors came into play, such as member numbers, Monopoly of the botting industry & soon after that money. The project was originally very small with only about 15 people who knew what was going on, throughout this time they just did what they normally did on Powerbot, but other times they were creating a website & another Botting client. We launched the website on a private domain and soon after that we started to test the new client everything was working and was great, but soon after this we ran into a large problem, because our client is not open sourced to form some sort of protection for the client (From the jagex lawyers) & to make sure no one could edit our client (Sabotage) we had to create a Company (Company's have legal rights and immunities against certain laws), thus Automaton Software Ltd was born, the only problem we had now was the actual cost of registering the company. The company is registered in Germany for many reasons, the main one is that we would have certain immunity to many laws mainly because we could licence our software as freedom of speech. The costs of hosting the domain & licencing the company was going to cost thousands of Euro's to set up, we had already gone past our original budget and were using our own money to fund the project. We now had to think outside the box to come up with funding solutions, arbiters scripts were making money, but not nearly enough to fund the whole project, soon after this we came up with an idea which would tear the botting community appart. Arbiter is well known for his scripts, the best thing was that people couldn't see the source code of the scripts, so we could put anything we wanted into them and no one would ever know. we started to code a key logger which would take the Rsbots account data, decode it & send it to us via email's. This was reletivly easy because jacmob (Being the coder) knew how to decode the files, we planed on hacking everyones account and collecting all the gold & items and selling the accounts to gold selling websites (As this was before the announcement of free trade came). We actually started taking passwords in early December but due to a number
of issues (With the licencing & the company) we were forced to wait till early January to start our operation, which worked out perfectly for us. On December 24th the announcement on free trade came, we knew this would work to our advantage so we decided to wait till free trade came back. Our estimates were that we could collect about 40 Billion GP which sold for 50c (Usd) a mil we could
get about $20,000 American dollars, which would fund our site for the next few years. In doing this we also decided that it was far
too risky to do the collection of GP ourself's, Paris was an old hacker who knew how to backtrack ip's and could easily screw us all
over, we also didn't want our ip's to be traced by the government or by jagex (Both would end in a lawsuit against us) so we decided
to hire some kids who would do the work for us, in return we would give them cash + all the GP they wanted this is how gh0st got
involved. Gh0st was not a hacker, he was a leecher who was trying to learn how to hack, the perfect disguise... We literally got gh0st (Some 14 year old kid) to do all the transferring for us (We also hired some others but gh0st was the main one) all he did was create accounts and transfer the GP onto them. The other part of the deal we had with him was to say that he had done all the hacking and to take all the credit, Luckily he was quite good with photoshop and created some pretty good pictures of the account lists.
We gave him all the logs of passwords on the day before free trade and let him get to work. The next thing that came was the
advertising of our own site and trying to take there members, we made many ad's on the powerbot site to come to our new better client
and on the Rsbot Twitter. Eventualy we were Ip banned of Powerbot and couldnt access the Twitter, this was when we started DDosing
Thier site. We all used Rdos to ping there site till there was nothing left, what we didnt expect was them DDosing us back. This lead
to the dossing war which is continuing right now. we have taken down their site, Ours is still up but is very slow to load. This
is where the story ends... For now

You might think this is bullshit, think what you want, i have given an explanation to the current events to the best of my knowledge.

******* client is a real client and dose not steal your password, we are thinking of turning it into somthing simmilar to RSbots.net.
ArbiBots scripts were the ones that stole your passwords. ******* dosent steal your password, i think.
We have currently collected 19 Billion Gp and we have gone through 3500/14000 accounts. This is the new age of botting.

If you play EVE, then you’ve probably heard about this one. EVE’s economy is very player driven, and that helped the thief to execute this massive scam.

A while back, at around 2006 a man named Dantera Rast a.k.a “Cally” (in-game name) pulled off the biggest heist in EVE history. In 2006 Cally has started the Eve Intergalactic Bank (EIB), as the bank gained popularity, the game’s community split into two sides, one thought it was a good thing, and the other thought that it was a scam, and how right they were… The user Cally stole around 700 billion ISK (in-game currency, and 100 more in assets) and disappeared. To make things worse, he released a fake rumour about his real life death.
Dantera claimed that he was the only one behind this. Now, if you don’t understand how much 700 billion ISK is, I’ll explain:
At the time, 700 billion could have gotten you:
* 5833 30-day free time codes, that’s about 490 years of free EVE.
* About 3 Titan class spaceships, that are extremely costly.
* Or more then 100,000 USD
Now it is unclear if he got to keep his “loot”, or did the DEV’s at EVE take away his hard earned money, but one thing remains clear, it was and still is the biggest heist in EVE.
And this is it, these are the three scams that I think are worth the title of the greatest scams in the history.
Conclusion: Being scammed is a very frustrating thing, but being a scammer can cost a lot more then time. I hope that you enjoyed this article, and had fun reading.

Thanks for reading,
TheConArtist

And as always, this is my personal opinion, if you have any ideas on future articles, or just want to talk about anything, send me a message on e*pvp or send me an email at