If an e-mail is found in the list of red flags, it means the scamming has been proved. If the e-mail is found in the list of yellow flags, it means the e-mail (and the person behind it) is in some way associated with scamming. You should refrain from trading with people found in BOTH the yellow flag list and the red flag list.

Head over to the list here: List of known World of Warcraft scammers.

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.

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 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.