I Just Got SCAMMED...feel so noobish...

"***names edited out*** are SCAMMERS! I'm 20k short now!"

NOTE TO MODS: Sorry, I'm not sure if we can mention names, but I think it is important in this case, especially since there is a chain of them working together.***Sorry...board policy. :/

Well, go around posting that around Lions Arch, where these guys operate enough, and you'll get sympathy from half, and called a noob who should raise your awareness by the other half. I guess both are right, and I guess I sort of had it comming. But come on, I should have known better, and this thread is here to hopefully stop YOU from getting scammed by these guys and their guild.

Everyone has seen those games in the major cities, Ascalon, LA, Amnoon Oasis, etc, where someone offers a prize for you to do something super simple, be it answering some random trivia for a Max bow, or getting into the water in LA for a gold Firey Dragon Sword. And in every case, I have ALWAYS recieved my reward if I have won. And I'm sure you have too. Kudos to the bored people who made those contests.

Anyway, last night, I happened to run across this newbie. (No, he isn't the one who scammed me). He wanted to be run from Beacons Perch to LA (which he didn't even know stood for Lions Arch), and was taking every percaution to make sure I wasn't being scammed out of my running services. (Pfft, everyone pays when I get there, don't have to spell out that you agree to pay so I can take a screen, but I appreciate the effort). Anyway, I ran this kid all over the place, eventually to Divinity Coast, and ToA. He was a Lv 12, and was throwing cash at me like crazy to give him farming info, weapons, etc. I got like 50k from him. And thats from someone who didn't even know what LA stood for. (He got the money from a friend who quit GW) So I came to believe that there were actual generous people out there.

SO HERES THE SCAM PART. While cruising in Lions Arch, ***name edited*** declares "Find me and win 100k and a max stormbow!" Easy enough, I find him hiding at the far off lighthouse. I open up his trade window. He closes it, and says I gotta do a little quest. "Find me a Dye Remover." Sure. A small 50g investment for a 100k, who could resist? I sprint to the Merchant, and eagerly buy 2 dye removers. I give him one Dye Remover, and say, do i get the prize now? He says there are more parts. He requests that I find an Orange Dye. I have 10 in storage. So sure...give him the dye. Now he wants a Sapphire. I'm like dooh... At this point, it seems like one of those cheezy junk mail trivia things, which enter you in a 1,000,000 dollar pot, but require you to send increasing amounts of money in their semi-final, super-semi-final, super-almost-final, etc rounds. So, I'm like, "You promise you'll pay if I win?" He says yes. So I buy him a Sapphire from the trader. Then he wants a Glob of Ecto. OMG...he promises theres only one more round after it. I already invested 10k in it so whats another 11? I give him the ecto, and he says the final quest is to give him another dye remover. BINGO, I have a spare in my inventory. Instantly, I open up his trade, and stick the Dye Remover in. He cancels trade, and announces that a guild mate, ***name edited*** is the winner. O...M...G...zqagiopnpobiuwenrtwohwrja...GAH!

I tell him that I won, and ask him why he canceled my trade. I tell him he's a scammer. I get a wonderful "***name edited*** has ignored you." (Wow. Thats the first time I've experienced being ignored.) So I'm now 20k short, and feeling extremely noobish. I just hope nobody else falls for this scam.

OK, I bet you want a screenshot. Well, these guys are crafty. They do it in LA, and the BIG heavily spammed districts. I wanted to take a screen, but by the time I scrolled up to find the evidence. It had been bumped off of the text history, by the wonderful "WTB your uber weapon" or "WTS my soul" spams.

Another player confirmed this scam. It would seem that ***name edited*** has been up to this before. He has various spinoffs. For example, finding him one of every color dye, then finally ending with a black. The prize was a Celestial Sigil. SCAM.

BUT, NO, I'm not the only idiot! At least 5 other people were playing his "Scavenger Hunt Quest Game" while I was. And you won't believe how many people played this game again when they rezoned and retried it in another LA district. I saw at least 10 people running back and forth doing their quest. Most of them stopped however, after I started posting my scam message.

So just be aware of these guys, and guild [WAR]'s scams. Ugg...now how to make back that money...I can't stand running Ascalon to Yaks Bend...so boring...

And so the greed was punished...

man don't feel bad. i'm sure at least almost everyone got scammed before whether it was on guild wars or somewhere else
"fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me." you know? (i hope its said like that..lol)

just learn from it and help others not to follow the same scam.

LOL, yup, shoulda pulled out before the Orange Dye. But Chinese man must protect his investment! (Pfft, so much for that)

You can try to report it, not sure if they'll do anything in this case though.

You have absolutely GOT TO BE KIDDING....

You gave him all that stuff and thought you would get something? LOL

You didnt get scammed, you got the Stupid with Greed skill cast on ya

LOL, LOL, LOL

If something sounds to good to be true it usually is. I would have quit after he wanted something and definitely when he asked for a ruby.

IDK, I guess he set it up well enough for myself and like a whole bunch of others to find it addicting and "challenging" enough. You see, if you know where the lighthouse is in Lions Arch, you'll know that its like a 1 min walk from there to the closest NPC (which would be storage/merchant/rare materials trader), which is what he has you access. So you would be doing this triathalon sort of thing, and in my mind, I was honestly going "Come on...sprint you damn monk...you're wearing Ascetics armor...run faster!" And that sort of cancels out the "OMG, I know this is a scam...OMG, hes going to scam me."

LOL, at the end, when I knew I had that dye remover, I was so excited...like "ZOMQFGBBQSAUCE! I've won the lottery" ....... Ugg...great...now I feel super stupid...lol.

The thing is I can't believe you actually gave him a sapphire, then an ecto. I would've collected the dye, asked for what the next item was, collected that, and if he wouldn't give info about the next item, I would know it was a scam.

YOU FELL FOR IT IT'S YOUR FAULT. When he asked for an orange dye I would have left. Serious, you should feel 'noobish'. I swear my jaw dropped in reading the whole post of yours. Good grammar and good spelling fell for such a scam.

um....you gave him the items at every step???

i would have showed him the stuff and only accepted the trade when all the items were gathered

so, your actually still 30k up

stop whining.. go have some cheez

you got whats coming.

That was just dumb.

I can't believe how unsympathetic people are being. Let me tell you, ANY scam you fall for, there will be somebody who is smart enough to think you were stupid for falling for it. Just because you think you're smarter than he is (and honestly I'm pretty sure some portion of you would have fallen for it too), does not mean that he 'deserves' what he got, and most certainly does not mean that it's 'his fault'. What a bunch of jerks...

/signed

Lay off the guy...sheesh

Uhh...he gave away stuff for a event completely up to the holders trust. His greed made him do it and his naivity lost him his money.

It is not deserving of any sympathy!

It is no different from a 419 scammer.

OMG why would u actually go on a quest that requires u to buy items for another person....Just plain stupid.

I'd lay off of him but what he did was just ridiculous. THINK MAN, THINK! And this involves virtual money which has no real value i'm not sypathetic for that. He deserved it, but atleast you learned from this expierence. That's the only good that came of this, don't trust people unless there are guilde-lines in every offer or trade.

Do you happen to be interested in buying a few bridges that I have for sale?

if he didnt want peoples opinions..he wouldnt post this.

I'm going to make a blacklist of scammers online. I know the guy you are talking about (F----- X) and I'm gonna add him. These scammers are noob-ass pirates and deserve to be blacklisted for their waste of people's time.

Well at least I still have chicken.

But whatever. All of you probably have like 1000k in storage so 20k is nothing to you. I'm not here to bitch about how I was scammed, but rather to inform other people who may possibly encounter him or his guild and go for it. And as I said, there are MANY people out there who were doing his little quests.

And tell you what, it is my fault. I'm not blaming anyone else. I'm not blaming the scammer for cheating me, although he is obviously a jerk, and I'm not blaming the inhabitants of Lions Arch for not restraining me. It's nobody's fault but my own, HOWEVER, I don't want to see anyone else fall for this scam. Especially a beginner, who may end up giving away the last of his gold. Because when that happens, they often leave the game.

Its easy for you to say that I should have left. You weren't there. You didn't need the money for a Celestial Sigil. I considered leaving, but it was a sure-win. And again, ALL the other games I played in actually gave out prizes upon victory. Sort of had a growing trust for the people in GW.

Well, you guys can call me a noob, and bash me for my ignorance. I got big shoulders. I can handle it. But just here to put out some information.

he didnt want peoples opinion, he just wanted people to be ware of scammers etc.

Well put...

Man if you fell for that scam you deserve to be scammed. I would never spend or go get anything and give to anyone else for a socalled "prize". I might look for them but that would be it.

First off key suspiscion would kick in when I saw FREE 100k. For the most part 99.9% of everyone is a greedy bassturd. (Excluding myself I'm that .01 percent lol). I've played many years of mmorpgs and have rarely been given anything of "great value". 100k I would consider great value and I would never fall for any such silliness like that to go running around creation for something I'd be sure I wasn't going to get.

I gave a Reinfoced Buckler Armor 16 +8 Armor vs Lightning -1 reduction to a guildie just yesterday. I knew I wasn't going to use it and he was drooling for it and it was only worth like 244gp. Now to some that might have been worth a lot. To me it wasn't what i wanted because it required (10 tactics) and I'm not a tactics build and don't intend to be one. So giving it to someone who could use it instead of hawking it for hours felt like the best avenue to take. Sure I coulda took the 244gp, but, I make that in 2 minutes or less anyways.

Best thing, earn what you get or have it given to you directly, don't go falling for silly scams, I have no symphathy for anyone who does.

generik: Hmm, bridge. Nope, I'm broke.

serpreme/omegabyr: Eh, opinions are ok, really doesn't matter much to me. Just keeps bumping it up to the top afterall.

sciros darkblade: Actually, those aren't any of the 3 who were working together in this ploy. Maybe its one of their secondary characters. However, if they were in the same guild which was running this operation...maybe. So as you can see from his post, these guys have a pretty big operation going.

explosivebadger: If it was real money, I wouldn't even have bought that dye remover.

Lord MoFo: Why? Because it started as a simple 50g (I believe) Dye Remover, with a prize of 100k.

Im pretty sure with Sreenie evidence Anet will ban these guys accounts. They have been pretty good about keeping scum out of this game. And to all you people calling him a noob your ignorance amazes me as his post was simply to inform and protect other people from scammers. And the "bitten by greed" not really he was simply being a trusting person dont even try to tell me that if in real life someone asked you to do a few chores for a million dollars you wouldnt try..... don't say you would try because if you do your a liar.


And as far as the boards policy against listing names.. there should be an exception made when the person being named is a scammer if adequate proof is given, it is essential to know the names of the person(s) doing the scamming so that you can avoid them.

I feel ya man, I got scammed out of 1k (I was broke at the time so 1k was like OMGYAYBBQ! to me)

his name was M------ T-- G----. (i'll let you fill in the blanks if you know who this could be.)

Promised me a refund (running from Droknars to copper) and when we got halfway his friend had to leave and we died alot so it didnt look like we were gonna make it. So i said "I just might have to ask for my refund now" or something like that. then BOOM they both left, I whispered him and got the "you are ignored" message, so i told his buddy he owed me money.

He must have took me off his ignore list, cause whenever I see he is on i just SPAM him to death. Just my little ounce of revenge till he decides to pay me back.

It happens to everyone Jon. You probably weren't the first and you probably won't be the last. People are so afraid of scammers now that they won't even accept max damage bows, hammers, swords and staffs when I try to give them away at Fort Ranik. Helping folks outside your guild has essentially been nullified. You'll make the loot back soon enough. Don't even worry about that guy.

It wouldn't be a few chores for the millian it would be spending 200,000 on random items all based on the word of a random stranger that he would give you a million. I don't think anyone would be that stupid. If it was done in real life some sort of contract would be written to protect you from a scam, and that cannot be done in GW so your comparison is completely pointless.

Some people have said earlier the smartest thing to do would be to collect the items and give them at the end for the 100k. You said yourself that others were participating in the challenge, so you weren't gauranteed the 100k if you got him the items.

The second part.

Others were participating. Yup, so I wasn't gauranteed the 100k. Exactly why I had some reason to continue on playing, and why it was so addicting. I figured at one point: "Hmm, I get it...hes trying to make over 100k in rare crafting materials in order to pay for his award. Makes sense." And the fact that you're RACING against other people makes you not think about anything, except: "Quickest path from merchant to generous beneficiary is..." and "OMG, why doesn't A-net allow sprint to work in cities."

But its a scam. And a very well thought out and executed one too. Especially how he only tells you there are more parts AFTER you have bought him the dye remover.

Stay Frosty: Wish I could. Curse you WTB WTS people in Lions Arch. Yup I shoulda turned off trade chat, but I was hoping to buy that sapphire and glob of ectoplasm for cheaper off a player. Probably yet another trick they had in their con scheme. Problem here, is that I don't have adequate proof. Of course, I'm not lying, but this isn't adequate proof.

IDK, in the game its sort of tricky warning people about scammers who work in packs, especially when they're in the same guild. One person is saying "So-and-so is a scammer" and the so-called-scammer's buddy is retorting "So-and-so is not a scammer, I joined his guild because he paid me 100k" and of course, the scammer himself is going, "WTF, I'm no scammer." Two versus one. And yet, reinfocring that they are generous people who will reward you if you do their quests.

Oh well, gotta get the news out somehow.

honestly both of you seem stupid for some of these circumstances but,,,

yea there is nothing you can do.. avoid it

That scammer is a genious.

I am VERY tempted to try this...

No offense but if you're that stupid you deserve to be scammed. It's just like the junk mail you get every week. You know the ones I'm talking about: "CONGRATULATIONS JOHN SMITH, YOU HAVE WON A MILLION DOLLARS!" etc etc. This is the exact same thing. Nobody is truly going to give you 100k out of the blue.

Wow...I didn't even have to read anyone else's replies to know that everyone was going to spam some "LOL TAKE THAT NOOB!!!" stuff, but some of this takes it a little too far. Calling him stupid is pretty rediculous, and quite frankly if you're willing to judge a person's intellegence on one story of them making a mistake in an effing video game, then I have just as much right to question your intellect as well. So I guess I have to assume that everyone who flames him not only makes NO mistakes ever, but also are so incredibly wise that by hearing one story in one's life they can determine how smart a person is. I'm sorry Mister Jon, but it looks like people here, for the most part, don't sympathize with scam victims (despite that threads that talk about all the scams going on are actually HELPFUL to the community, as where insulting people on forums is a complete waste of time). But cheer up bud, because it's only 20k in a video game. I'm sure it's upsetting, but it's not even close to being something you can't recover from. Now that I've probably gotten myself into a fire fight, please note that I don't care if people think my opinions on this matter are stupid and lame, so feel free to try to defend a counter-point. All I ask is that you think before you speak. I'm sure I'll be enlightened.

I wouldn't call him stupid....i'd call him gullible. Though, nowhere near as gullible as a friend of mine...believed me for over an hour that there was gullible written on the roof

Great, perfect, this is exactly what you diserve. Getting scammed is impossible in this game unless you're stupid, so stop whining. This is the worsed scammer in the world, but yet he fools someone?

I've played this game since the release date and I've never been scammed, if you pay attention, and don't do anything stupid you wont get scammed, believe me.

First step is admitting to it, which has been done many times...no need to go nuts on him (only word i can think of).Sure i ain't been scammed cos i've had bad experiences...and, usually only manage to sell thinks worth 2k and up. So, i'm careful with my money....i'm also a greedy bastard..but that's a different story.