This scam is probably the oldest one in the book and it happens almost every day. With 11,5 million monthly subscribers, the economy related to buying, selling and trading World of Warcraft accounts is huge. I am very pleased to see the authorities dealing with the losses inflicted by these scammers in such a serious manner.

The thing about Western Union is that payments are in no way traceable or accountable. The underlying system behind Western Union was crafted so people could send money to friends, relatives and trusted recipients ONLY. This is a well documented fact and Western Union even have it written on their website: “The service a great way to send money to someone you know and trust but if you need to send money to someone you don’t know well you may be putting yourself at risk of fraud.” In my opinion this sums up exactly why you shouldn’t be using Western Union as a means of expediting funds to someone you’ve never met.

Accepting a Wester Union payment requires no proof of identity but solely relies on a ‘pre-established code’. This code is what proves your right to the funds. So in essence, anyone who has this code in their possession is entitled to the funds connected to it. Anyone with the requisite recipient information can claim the funds as cash and vanish! This is the exact reason why so many scammers use Western Union as their payment method of choice. To my knowledge, the only known means of checking the identity of the person drawing the funds is to contact Western Union to see whether the branch had a CCTV record which could be passed to your local police department. This would require you to file a complaint first, and as the amounts are usually small, a lot of people simply don’t bother. It’s always worth it though, perhaps not to your own personal case but it could build up a picture of the scammer, if he pulls the same stunt on a lot of different people.

A Western Union transfer as I’ve described it sounds like a pretty horrible thing, but it isn’t. It’s great for the purpose which it has always been intended to serve. Worth noting however is that you should never, never, never use Western Union to send money to someone you’ve never met and isn’t directly related to.

The YouTube scam is in most cases so poorly executed that anyone with above average intelligence will see right through them. The spelling is horrible, the story is predictable and the suggested methods often make no sense at all.

That being said, I’m writing this post on them anyway, just so you’re covered in all aspects of scamming. YouTube scams mostly offer solutions in the following categories: Hacking other people’s WoW accounts; receiving or generating free game cards; receiving or generating codes for rare pets and mounts (spectral tiger being one the most popular ones) and receiving some sort of attractive gear/item for free. Of course, it’s all non-sense. Blizzard has stated on several occasions that they only use their official channel for promotional purposes.

To my knowledge there exists no programs that are able to artificially create items, mounts, gold or game cards. No is there any method to hack other people’s WoW accounts, unless you the information is handed over by (or phished out of) the user.

Below is a prime example of how far the scammers are willing to go, to scam you of your account.

Basically every single video in this list on YouTube is fake. They serve no other purpose than to lure you into sending your account name and password to them.

So where do the scammers come up with these methods? is a prime location. Although the site has officially gone white hat – or legal in layman’s terms – the members are still the same scammers they were before. The people “helping out” on MMOwned are the exact same people who’ve been orchestrating scams ever since World of Warcraft was released.

where a user describes the GameCard Generator scam in detail.

Here’s another thread describing how you can manipulate the views your YouTube scam video gets, to get a higher rank in the search results.