The Auction House Scam

Posted on | January 16, 2010 | No Comments

The3184auction_hammer Auction House scam comes in various sizes and shapes. Each variant abuses the system on a different level. On a very basic level, the scam merely monopolizes and drives up prices in the Auction House. More devious and advanced scams are capable of actually – and very directly – defrauding other players.

The basic Auction House scam that many people utilize is completely within the game rules set by Blizzard. The scam is innocent enough in that it only involves manipulating the in-game economy a bit. This basic variant is pretty easily detectable. All you need to do is keep track of prices and values in the Auction Houses across different realms. By having a general overview and impression of what an item costs, you’ll easily be able to single out prices which seem incongruous or out of place.

The scam can be broken into a few steps. The first step is in the gray area of what can be defined as scamming, contrary to later steps.

Scammers often use rare items as an items bait efficiency rises exponentially with rarity. Let’s use Silk Cloth as an example. The scammer purchases all Silk Cloth on the Auction House (perhaps 4-5 stacks). This is to ensure he or she is the only one selling Silk Cloth. With this power the scammer is efficiently capable of setting the price of Silk Cloth to whatever he or she pleases. Keep in mind, this is not what I would describe as an actual malicious scam. I would rather define it as creative use of an in-game mechanism.

After the scammer has gained full control of the market, there is a series of scams available to make sure the items are sold quickly and at the asked price. One scam is to hotlink an item that they do not have in the trade channel. The item could be an epic or blue weapon or similar. The scammer then offers to trade the epic weapon for a random number of Silk Cloth.

Hopefully this will send atleast one player rushing to the Auction House to buy the requested amount of Silk Cloth. When the buyer then whispers the scammer, he or she simply states that the item has already been traded.

This post will be updated regularly as new variants emerge.

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Category: Scamming
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