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Post by morshu on Jul 4, 2022 11:25:04 GMT
Virtual item fraud can be a legal gray area; meaning in some states or countries, you may be able to do this and get away with it after being caught, while other states or countries would have harsh penalties for it. Whether these items have monetary value in legal terms, and whether stealing them from someone is treated the same as stealing bank notes, varies by different locations.  One thing that interests me about this kind of theft, fraud or whatever you would define it as, is that it is often performed by the same people who do whatever they can to get credit card numbers from whoever they talk to. These credit cards, because this is the area of expertise that is shared by these particular scammers, will then buy virtual items to sell for non-traceable currency, and after that one of 3 things will happen: 1: the card owner doesn't successfully get a refund, and loses the money; 2. The card owner does a chargeback and the virtual items disappear, leaving the person who paid for them with nothing and potentially with their account banned until they can prove they were not one of the scammers; 3: The card owner does a chargeback and the third-party seller of these tradable virtual items that are often exchanged for real money, loses the money they were paid for their items. So I want to know; at what point do we at ScambaitingForum.com define what these dishonest people are doing as a scam, and one worth baiting? The scams often involve the scammer giving a potential victim a series of instructions to follow, and then demanding screenshots to prove the victim has done as they were told. You cannot actually follow the scammer's instructions without them getting your redeemable-for-cash items or your money or your account banned for installing a game purchased with a stolen credit card, so you would need to be able to make good, convincing fake screenshots in order to keep the scammers interested in being baited. It is worth noting that I personally have hundreds of dollars worth of items like this that scammers want to steal, which could potentially be used for baiting. They function very similarly to gift cards; you can buy them with money, exchange them for merchandise, and sell them for cash. They are also very similar to cryptocurrency without the unnecessary repeated decryption processes, in that I myself have bought many of those Mann Co. Supply Crate Keys when they were cheaper than 1.71 and sold them for a profit when they were more expensive, then bought them again when the price dropped; and so on and so forth. It's a way to get a few extra US dollars to convert into my local currency, and shows how their value is tied to real money. |
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Post by Gerald Croft on Jul 4, 2022 14:02:25 GMT
An interesting question. It seems to me that if a scammer asks a victim to buy these virtual tokens and then transfer them, this is just a different method of money laundering and no different to any other scam. However, if the victim already has the tokens then we run into the question not only of whether they have any "real" value but also of who legally owns them -- is it the player, or the people who make the video game, since they control what can be done with tokens?
Either way I don't think I would object to a bait involving such a scammer, as long as (a) they are doing it for their own financial gain, (b) they deceive people and (c) the person who is deceived suffers a loss that they would not have been prepared to suffer if they had not been deceived.
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Post by Admin on Jul 4, 2022 15:46:13 GMT
Thanks for the question! Scambaiters have always baited Advanced Fee Fraud scammers. Does your example fall into an AFF category? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scamIs the perpetrator offering the victim something in exchange for an upfront fee? |
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Post by morshu on Jul 4, 2022 21:13:24 GMT
They do this and many other scams; an example of advance fee fraud in virtual item trading: A scammer steals a credit card from someone, buys CD key, gives it to someone, then demands that they pay for it after it is already attatched to their account, and the victim may lose the game they're paying for and their items and receive a ban for suspected credit card fraud until they prove their innocence
Some scammers promise entry into a tournament with a $700 prize and being on the team that's already in second place, then luring the victim to a phishing site.
Do you agree that these fit into the category?
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Post by morshu on Jul 9, 2022 2:16:48 GMT
I just remembered another thing that often happens; when a victim runs out of valuable items for the scammer to steal, a scammer will often tell the victims, sometimes while playing a different character (the recovery scam guy instead of the fake item storage guy who impersonates the real item storage guy, etc), that they need to try to get their items back using a credit card; and then of course the scammer will do everything they can to get more money out of the credit card; so that becomes what you call the recovery scam, which is a form of advance fee fraud. right? It varies based on the situation and what scam the scammer chooses or knows how to do, so you never know at this point if the scammer will try to get the victim to buy something for the scammer to have and sell, or if they will send the victim to a phishing site, or simply try to trick the victim into giving out their card info. I'm not completely sure if these are all forms of advance fee fraud, or it has to be that the scammer asks the victim for money instead of stealing it before the victim knows about the transfer being made. In case you doubt if the golden frying pan, the rarest, most desired prize in the popular slow-paced, gameplay-heavy gambling game Mann Vs Machine where you can buy tickets to fight robots to win prizes, is worth real money, the one in the screenshot that I showed has now been sold, the website has none of them left, and the cheapest golden pan on the market is now US$6,000; so of course every scammer wants to steal this item, and unfortunately for potential victims, everyone playing the game is notified whenever someone wins one of these items.  Here is the price history chart and buy orders for the golden pan; as you can see, if you bought one of these when they cost US$2,200, some people would think you were making a big mistake at the time, but if you sell it today to the highest paying buy order, you would instantly get a big profit, and it would not look like you had made a mistake when buying it anymore. After the 5% listing fee, the 5045 usd would become $4,792.75, leaving you with a profit of 2,592.75 USD, and only a 3 USD fee if you wanted to withdraw the funds to your back account. |
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Post by Admin on Jul 9, 2022 13:43:10 GMT
How does a baiter recognize the scammer to be able to bait them? How do you avoid ITPs (Innocent Third Parties)? Are there people that do what you've described, but are not scammers?
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Post by morshu on Jul 10, 2022 2:17:34 GMT
I'm a little bit confused by the questions. Do you mean would someone who isn't a scammer buy a golden pan and then try to sell it for a profit in USD? Yes, lots of people do that; only scammers will try to steal a golden pan. In terms of ITPs, I think that once a scammer like this messages you, it's harder to find an ITP than it is to avoid them; they may send you links to the profile page of whoever they are impersonating, but as long as you understand that the person who's identity they're using isn't involved in the scam, no ITP should become involved. If you're a trader, you're expected to have a public profile where everyone can see all your items; otherwise you'll be suspected of potentially hiding stolen items. As soon as you start getting items that can be sold for money for tf2, cs:go or other games, you will start to get messages from scammers who think they've found a clever way to get your items without paying for them. Some of these scammers will send you fake screenshots of your profile page with red alert banners on it that say that you're about to get banned unless you send your items to a 'verification bot' to prove they're not stolen; I managed to waste 30-45 minutes of one of these scammer's time by pretending to fall for it once, but overall this scam is done by relatively skeptical scammers who will leave in an instant if they even suspect that you're playing tricks on them or that you know it's a scam. If I'd had fake screenshots to convince them that I DID press all the necessary buttons send my items to the scammer's fake bot, and perhaps error messages to give the scammer a believable explanation for why the scam isn't working at this point, perhaps I could have taken up more of this scammer, and the next one's, time and energy. When you ask how to know when you're dealing with a scammer, it's a tricky question because there are very many scams out there, old scams, new scams, and scams that haven't even been done yet but will be a big problem in the future. You can recognize scams that have been done by comparing a scammer's behavior with the behavior of known scammers, but that only catches scammers doing known scams. Here is one example of a scam; you can see that the scammer was not done after getting the victim's golden pan, but then demanded the rest of the victim's items, and when the victim was out of items, the scammer told the victim to go find a credit card, and when the victim refused, the scammer said that because the victim wouldn't get a credit card for the scammer, the victims items would now be lost forever, as if that were the reason for it. The mod who handled this issue, I find him to be very incompetent; I tried to contact the victim to help them find a mod who would give more effort towards giving this scammer his red scammer label on the site and ban him from various trading sites, as well as give this victim a chance to get his items back instead of doing nothing, but the victim might have been too suspicious to talk to me and wouldn't respond to any messages from me. backpack.tf/issue/623d8fd53be0b650156ebafcI would say this scam is the digital equivalent of waiting outside a casino for someone to come out after winning some money and then trying to steal it from them; however these scammers will target not only winners but people who've bought a golden pan or another golden item that you can win from the game (which could be worth about 15-150 USD) as an investment or just to have in their collection. |
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