So yesterday, 24/03/16 I was busy smelting Pyrite Ore into bars and in the very corner of my eye, I noticed in chat, that someone was eager to sell 8 pets, 7 of which were (TCG) Trading Card Game pets and 1 Hatespark of the Tiny. The person was demanding 750k gold and me thinking that was an extremely good offer to ignore, went into overdrive and quickly contacted the seller and purchased the pets without hesitation.
Thankfully, my excitement led me to posting my purchase on Twitter, obviously to boast (as you do). If you’re following me on Twitter, you’d have seen my tweets. Within minutes @RosheenWoW and @pee_lyon contacted me insisting that they maybe dupes. I’d not seen any evidence in-game for me to lead this to be the case, but now I was somewhat concerned. So without delay I contacted a (GM) Game Master and I informed them of my naivety and wanted them to look into it. Today I finally got a reply, one of which kind of threw me back, as I was warned I may lose my gold and all pets returned to their rightful owner if they’ve been exploited. I quickly replied, insisting that they need to look into this as soon as possible, as my full intentions were to buy pets cheap to flip on the Auction House to make a profit and the last thing I wanted to do was jeopardise my gold and someone else’s pets for my own gain and make this matter far worse than it already was.
Within an hour a GM called Fairgano got back to me and we went into great detail of what happened yesterday and thankfully it was brought to my attention, that these were in fact stolen from someone’s Guild Bank and maliciously sold in trade. Now being a victim of having items stolen in-game myself through hacking, I could relate to this and was extremely pleased that the pets could be reunited with their rightful owner. Thankfully my gold was returned to me too, but had it been a different GM, it could quite easily have been the opposite. All the same, I learnt a very important lesson today and hopefully I’ll be more vigilant when trading in the future.
The GM Fairgano, also knew I was a collector and avid seller of battle pets and actually sent me a private in-game message with some pet treats in. This was a very nice gesture and one which made me giggle. Little minds and all…lol.
It’s a sad time, when there’s players out there, willing to ruin another players enjoyment, by stealing their hard earned items, for their short gains and to make matters worse, bring innocent people into the equation via trade. The morale of all this as the title of the post states, “If it’s too good to be true, it very likely is!” Heed caution and if you do have any concerns, always get in touch with a GM by opening a ticket. I was obviously embarrassed by all of this, but the result is what was important and thankfully on this occasion, everyone has their items and gold back and the culprits have been caught and their accounts closed. The problem is, with World of Warcraft easily accessible now, via offers, it’s easy to just open a new account, just to make another person’s game time a misery and so the merry-go-round continues.
Anyway, thanks for reading and be vigilant out there…