Gold Sellers, Pushing it over the limit?

"...that they pm people from their customer data base which have brought from them in the past.."

This is not TRUE = I never make business & 10 days ago in ToA, I received such a message. A very POLITE message, I replied that it wasnt interesting me & I got a reply of the "BOT" (which is not) saying that it may be usefull sometimes.....

from what i've seen they look at people in the party search window. i usually leave 2 or 3 characters in there to sell stuff and i got whispers on all of them from top to bottom according to their location on the list.

i seem to be one of the only people who has never receved a PM offering me gold selling.

I used to think the same about myself. That changed though about 1 hour ago when I got my very first one while out in the Desolation. Not in the outpost, but in the actual explorable area. Something tells me, from what I'm seeing around these boards that more and more of this is occuring, it won't be my last message recieved from a spam bot.

To whoever said that he heard from a person that these bots are just messaging people who've already bought gold; you shouldn't believe everything. As I'm sure 99% of the people here who have stated, including myself, I've never, ever, purchased online gold. I work for my gold. I don't buy into the lazy mans method of aquiring things. I will even state here, I welcome ANet, with my full permission to view and even post publicaly, my Gold balance history to see for themselves that at no point in my GW playing history have I suddenly received 100K worth of gold in a single automated transaction.

To make the assumption that only those who get the spam have already bought it online is a very dangerous assumption to make, especially with no proof to back it up. Furthermore, it makes no sense anyways for the selling company to spam current, or past customers. They're looking to make money and expand customers. That means marketing to players that haven't bought.

More than likely those that run the spam bots are literally sitting in various towns and outposts and literally writing down Character names. It's obviously a slow process to do it like that, but if you think about it, it would explain the slow rise in the spam and the slow rise in the amount of people who are receiving it.

What language is that message in anyway?

I can't figure heads or tails of it.

Here you go.

Simple, easy source of character names. All they have to do is to spider popular forums and locate character names who are guaranteed to have "<div> Chraracter: " prefix and ends with "</div>".

Its one afternoon work if you never did it before. (i should know, i wrote such thing myself thou for different use.)

Yes, people have all kinds of stuff in that box, but that can be corrected or discarded automatically if text does not fit possible character name.

I've had this happen on two accounts. One wasn't really a surprise because I was trading in Kamadan at the time. But the other one was. That account doesn't trade nor has character names on any forum.

All I had done that day was go through Lion's Arch on my way to somewhere in Tyria. I thought that maybe they were sitting in the major towns and just writing down names. If that's how they're getting names, then there's no avoiding them if you move between continents.

Maybe it was your leet warrior fow that attracted them to you..

I got them when i was buying ectos and shards

I think they have some kind of logger that logs all the people that come into a certain city.... and then "x" amount of time later or right away they message the person.

I was in LA... and I was looking for a guildie out of about 5 dis's. So I was quickly leaving one dis, going into another, leaving, entering etc.... It seemed like every other time I entered I got a message within 5sec's of being there.

Also I was in HA last night... made a brand new pvp char... went into HA Int dis1 not more than 5min later I got a whisper.

Does everyone forget Diablo 2? They spam you while you're sitting in the game (imagine the spam in an outpost).

Well one thing to think about with them pming you as soon as you log in, there are only a few spots where players will spawn and some like Kamadan where they are within view of each other, they probably just check for new names popping in.

I remember getting those.. I reported them..
Anet probably didn't do anything.. they we're too busy rushing GW:EN for some quick cash.

i got some too, but the odd thing is that they were while i was at AB =///

I used to get em all the time when I played WoW. You could be anywhere and they basically would message hack so that the whole area received the same damn spam message. Then people came up with spam blockers, so blizz copied it and implemented it, making it great. Basically it caught the message, told you it was spam, then you could auto report it. After that, they resorted back to making raids and them spamming the whole time till you left. To make it funnier, they did one in Iron Forge where a bunch of Gnomes died in mid air spelling out the name of the website across the entrance to the bank and AH. Basically, once they arrive, good luck getting rid of em. They are worse than the plague.

I too have fallen prey to the spam whispering, not just me but all of my guildies in the group, within seconds of arriving in an almost empty outpost. We all added him to the ignore list and moved on. but this is infuriating. someone should start a petition to have a-net make the approved whispers list. Something like a friends list but way longer and add in a better status like not receiving unapproved whispers. I am an honest player and have not, nor ever, done things to violate the EULA and people that do and get away with it really piss me off........

- There is a very easy fix to this problem. It's called spam filter, which you can turn ON and OFF. When it's ON, only people who can send a PM message to you are the ones you have put on your friend's list, and members in same guild and alliance. When turned OFF, everyone can PM you, which is useful when trading. It's a direct extension to ticking off local and trade chats when in outposts. When gold sellers lose their means to communicate with people, the phenomenon will cease and the problem will be solved. (think spam filters with emails)

I wish ANET developers would actually read these forums.

If you put a spam filter in, you would have to turn it off and on if your selling and such; And sometimes you get random people that will PM you for various reasons (I know I've PMed some people who had names from books I've read/liked and I just chat with them for awile)

I havn't gotten a gold-seller site PM in about a month, but whenever I got one me and my guild would just spam them and put them on ignore for like 15 minutes for kicks.

Fun times.

You sir, are my hero

I got this message, a friend of mine as well. both of us got the message when we arrived at random arena. so i dont think that they spidered any forums, but scanned the random arena place for names, or propably other places as well. anyway, it doesnt matter how they got the names, the whole thing pretty sucks.