We were out with a few friends last night, and one of them told me about this “job” he just got. He’s been out of work recently, and was looking for a way to make money. He came across this ad on Craigslist, and he’s hoping it’s the break he’s been looking for. I just don’t see how it works, and i suspect a scam.
If i understood him correctly, this is how it goes:
The people he works for (who appear to be based in China), have World of Warcraft prepaid game cards like this one delivered to his door (by UPS or FedEx).
He opens the box, scans or photographs the card (which apparently has a code on it for activation) and emails the image to his game-playing overlords.
Profit!!! They will pay him $20 per card he scans, and promise that once they know he’s reliable they will send him up to 300 cards per month to scan.
He’s only done a few so far, and it’s not quite clear to me whether any money has actually changed hands yet or not. He said he has the option of being paid by PayPal or by check. I did a search and couldn’t find anything about this type of job, nor anything describing it as a scam (maybe my Google-fu is weak today), but it just seems pretty unlikely to me that someone is willing to pay $20 for about one minute of work. And with 300 cards, making $6000 a month for scanning cards just seems too good to be true.
In the absence of other explanations, my first thought is simply that they get each individual to do bunch of cards over the first few weeks, then don’t pay them (or send them a bad check) and move on to the next sucker.
Also, i know that World of Warcraft and other role-playing games have generated their own economies, and that people in China (and probably elsewhere) make real money by selling games points, gold, etc. But i don’t know why these people want scans of the WoW pre-paid game cards. Are those cards illegal, or difficult to obtain, in China?
Does anyone know what’s going on here? These friends are a bit short of money right now, and i’d prefer that he didn’t waste his time on a scam, but i also didn’t want to rain on his parade until i did some investigation.
I’m having difficulty coming up with a legitimate business reason to do this. Not saying there isn’t one, mind.
Gold farmers in WoW play high-level characters and generate lots of gold, which they then agree to sell to players for various amounts. I don’t pay much attention to the gold spammers other than to report them, but I think the going price may be about $30 real money for 5,000 gold WoW money.
The problem with this is that the EULA for WoW specifies that the characters you play, and everything they own, is the property of Blizzard, to discourage people from doing exactly this, because what these people are doing amounts to selling something they’re basically renting–like getting utilities free with your apartment rental, and charging your neighbor to toss an extension cord over the fence so he can use “your” electricity.
If this is a fairly new operation, I would guess that it’s a new dodge that farmers have come up with to hide or disguise their activities.
First thing that comes to mind (I’m not at all saying this is what’s going on-I have no evidence, no opinion, and no reason to believe either way)-but this is the first “scam” I’ve come up with that fits the pattern.
WOW cards are bought with stolen credit cards/hacked paypal accounts/stuff like that.
WOW cards are sent to somebody in U.S. of A.
–It doesn’t look suspicious because the cards are being sent to a U.S. address (as opposed to the red lights that’d start going off if a credit card only used in peoria for the last ten years gets used to buy stuff that’ll be sent to china).
Person in U.S. scans the parts of the cards necessary to get the value off of them, sends details to someone far out of the country.
Someone else uses the cards (or sells them to people far out of the country, who use them). Profit.
FBI knocks on door of person who’s been mailed a boatload of cards purchased with stolen credit cards.
To me, the thing that raises my suspicion is that he’s being paid $20/card. The fact that this “employer” is willing to pay $20 for 30 seconds work tells me one of two things: Either that employer is an idiot who doesn’t realize that they could pay an employee $20/hour to do that kind of work, or he’s using money that isn’t his, and doesn’t care how much he pays (or doesn’t ever intend to actually pay the “employee”)
Either wealthy Chinese kids are willing to pay top dollar for access to an American server( I think that’s right, I don’t play video games), or he’s being scammed in some way. Sending goods purchased with a stolen credit card to a patsy is an old, old credit card scam.
This isn’t just top dollar. He’s being offered $20/card. 300 cards/month.
By my count, that’s $6,000/month or $72,000/year.
I’m doubtful that there’s ANYONE willing to pay someone they found on craigslist $72,000/year for a job a monkey could do–open some packages, scan some cards, e-mail them to somebody. If this really was someone selling the cards at a high premium in china, why on earth would they choose to spend that much money just to get them delivered and scanned----that expense would come straight out of their profit.
yeah, your friend isn’t gonna get paid, and he might get a knock on his door from the cops. I’d give him a heads up and possibly let him go to the cops first and let them know what’s going on.
also, unless this offer came from Chinese family of the party in question, it’s unlikely. I’d imagine they’d use a trusted friend or relative living in the USA if they were just trying to get USA WOW prepaid game card codes transmitted to Chinese professional gold farmers.
Yeah my money is on the fact at some point he’ll be asked to fork out some kind “processing fee” or “deposit”, once they get that that I suspect his “Chinese” friends will suddenly be very hard to contact.
Its just possible that there is something very illegal going on, and they are setting him up take all the risk for tiny percentage of the profit, but that is very unlikely IMO (I’m sure they’d be able to find plenty of people prepared to take that risk, without resorting to complete strangers on craigslist). The perception your are doing something illegal is used in alot of scams (as it means you are less likely to go to the police once you realise you’ve been scammed)
I’m thinking they’re using Joe Random in order to deflect suspicion/blame. If they’re using stolen credit cards or something similar to get those WoW prepaid cards, they don’t want their family to get busted and then rat them out. The cards are probably being used to pay for “gold farmer” or “powerleveler” accounts on US servers.
(Gold farmer = People who spend all their time playing a game to accumulate lots of game money and goodies, then sell them to other players for real money. “Powerleveler” = People who will play very intense sessions with one or more high level characters, bringing along a low-level character owned by someone else, to get that person up in levels very quickly. This involves getting access to your account, which you may realize is incredibly stupid because they could just steal all your stuff if they wanted.)
I doubt it’s a gold farmer. Wouldn’t a golf farmer want to use a higher level character so they can collect larger amounts of gold? Or is a month of the free trial long enough to level up enough to make it worthwhile?
Just out of interest, has he provided sufficient personal details to his ‘employers’ to enable them to order these prepaid cards on some sort of wholesale account set up in his name, with credit terms? If so, it could be that there’s a big invoice headed his way, by which time the scammers will have dropped him and disappeared.
These aren’t free trial cards, these are 1-month subscriptions.
You can tack these cards onto an existing account to extend service, so if you’ve got an account you’ve paid up for 4 months, you can use one of the cards to let you play for month 5.
On edit:
This presupposes that there are any actual cards at all; they may rip him off before mailing him anything besides a bogus financial instrument…
At least back when I played, it could. A lot of gold farmers would run bot programs, pick a quiet mid-level area with monsters a few levels below them, and let their bots auto-run all day. The bot programs would kill, loot and skin, and move on to the next target. At the end of 24 hours you might have stacks of mid-level leather, some greens or blues to sell to twinked-out characters, and some other goodies. Auction that off and you could be making hundreds in gold a day (back when that was a lot of money in WoW).
I saw them all the time in some level 30-40 zones. A player used to quick leveling could probably get a character to that level in 48 hours or less, leaving a bunch of time to make some money.
Gold farming isn’t about leveling your characters high and running dungeon after dungeon. It takes a long time to get a high-level character, then you have to find four other people to run a dungeon with, then hope that a valuable bind-on-equip item drops (and those aren’t common). It’s a lot more profitable to grind common but boring drops at lower levels, because your return is more steady and almost all of the lower-level items can be used by all characters.
Thanks for all the replies, folks. I’m going to send him the link to this thread and let him decide for himself what he wants to do. I certainly agree that there’s likely to be some sort of credit card fraud and/or bogus payment problems on the horizon.
It’s not quite clear to me exactly how much information he has given them. They must have his name and address, at least, so they can have the cards delivered to his door.
The cards do exist; he had already received and scanned a few of them. As i said in the OP, though, i’m not sure whether there has been any payment yet. I didn’t want to push too hard about the whole thing, because we were in a group of people and i didn’t want to ask potentially embarrassing questions in front of the others.