Guild Wars 2

About 5 days ago it started. Whispers from characters with garbled names that advertise gold selling services. I’ve reported them every time I got the message, but they just don’t seem to be stopping. What’s the security loophole that allows this to happen?

people actually listening to them and buying gold. Thus they get hacked, thus the gold sellers have another account to start selling gold with.

Also people who have weak passwords

Also people who fall for the phishing emails.

Anet can only do so much, the loop hole is people themselves not educated when something is a scam

Don’t forget to use the block function right after reporting them.

Peace.

Actually, block then report. Sometimes they get a second spam off at you during the time you’re reporting.

Please don’t buy gold other than with gems, y’all. I cannot imagine how anyone needs to take all the risks that go with buying from spammers. In any game, really, but especially here where the only thing large amounts of gold gets you is some vanity bling. Is that worth losing your account, possibly getting your bank account compromised, and so forth?

The gold sellers I have seen got reall bad prices compared to ArenaNet’s own gem to gold service.

I don’t even know why.

The security loophole is people who buy gold with real money, which allows the gold sellers to buy more accounts to use to sell more gold.

If they buy a bunch of accounts when the game is on sale then it probably doesn’t take much for them to break even, especially when you factor in free use of hacked accounts.

It come and goes. I think there was maybe 5 or 6 waves like that. Gold sellers starts whisper everybody like crazy, ppl report them, anet accumulate information and mass ban their accounts, we don’t see any gold sellers during months, then the circle start again.

Nothing more can be done. Anet actually do a great job with gold sellers, but from time to time they just spam players like crazy before Anet can mass ban their accounts. Usually these account were hack from player that no longer play so Anet can’t do much to prevent that, just fix the problem as good as they can when it get out of control.

If only there were a filter we could apply to the incoming chats (like the one Anet already has in place for certain ‘swear’ words) that’s we could put our own key words in. It wouldn’t take long to vastly reduce that whisper spam.

i play in EU and i hardly get those messages, mabee US players buy more on the blackmarket?

I imagine sellers might consider the pickin’s good right after Christmas and all those new, unsuspecting accounts….

Block and report; ArenaNet will do the rest.

exp.3178:

i play in EU and i hardly get those messages, mabee US players buy more on the blackmarket?

I was thinking the same. They used to be quite common but in the last few months I’ve seen maybe one or two.

I wonder if someone somehow worked out that the US servers are a better target? I suspect they have a higher total population since pretty much everyone outside Europe uses those servers.

exp.3178:

i play in EU and i hardly get those messages, mabee US players buy more on the blackmarket?

Believe me, I’ve blocked hundreds of them over the course of the last 2 years. Hundreds, no exaggeration, and I’m on EU (Piken Square). However, it can be said that I have a higher-than-average playtime so that could be why. It is dying down a bit in EU servers admittedly, but they are still around.

As mentioned by various other players, always right-click, report for Selling Gold, then block. They get dealt with fairly quickly which is fair play to ArenaNet with their fast responses. Unfortunately, they have to be dealt with on an individual basis, as they clearly use proxies to hide their IP for each and every character, so we have to report them, one bot at a time.

We are winning though.

I’ve been getting these quite a bit the last two weeks. EU server

It would be nice to have swifter responses from staff when it comes to gold sellers. Had the same one in DR whispering me for 3 days every time I’m there, reported it at least 20 times, still no sign of it being killed off.

I did get spam-attacked over the weekend too. Whoever it was had no less than 4 separate spam accounts, but I blocked and reported them all. That stopped them cold.

I haven’t gotten a gold seller spam in weeks. Maybe even months.

I’m kind of disappointed. Reporting those idiots is one of my great joys in GW2. OK, maybe not GREAT joys, but I do get a bit of satisfaction from it.

I never block them, just report. I like to see how long it takes before they are silenced. It doesn’t take long btw. I rarely get more than 2 and only a few times 3 or 4 (probably because those were low population times, so fewer people reporting). They also seem to stick to home cities. I’ve seen fewer over time once LA got destroyed.