While the MMO Fallout inbox is never saturated with emails, so to speak, I get a fair amount of tips especially regarding outbreaks of account theft. For the most part, these thefts are not real. A person will have his account stolen at the general time his friend did, so his conclusion is that a lot of accounts must be getting stolen (or the company is selling accounts to gold farmers, please stop emailing me with those conspiracy theories). A quick check of our archives will show that I do indeed report on legitimate server breaches.
One particular email I received prompted this article: To sum it up, a “regular reader” made the claim that I am being paid off by “illegitimate gold farmers and bot developers” to not post warnings when a bot program is actually a trojan horse or a gold farming company starts stealing credit cards. To start off, my apologies to this disenfranchised man. Secondly: I don’t believe in warning potential cheaters that their service of choice may be even less legitimate than thought.
Let’s break that down, shall we? To use the term “illegitimate gold farmer” implies that there are legitimate gold farmers, which would only apply if the developer sold the gold/items or authorized players to do so. No, I’m not going to make the baseless claim that all gold farmers are identity thieves, but to call the business legitimate is about as disingenuous as you can get. Rather, I see the system as knowing the risks. You buy gold knowing full well the potential consequences if this person turns out to be an actual criminal. To give an outside comparison, this is akin to the people who buy laptops off of truck beds in parking lots and then find out the box is full of rocks.
So I don’t write warnings about criminal cheat websites for a few reasons, but I do write articles like this one warning the unwary (however few of you might exist) that gold farming outfits are indeed shady business that has become a haven for identity theft. This way, when the time comes that your Runescape account is cleaned out and Jagex bans you for buying powerleveling services, you might not write to me and ask me to warn other people about an illegitimate service turning out to be a scam.
MMO Fallout 