Discussion: Zero Tolerance RMT Tells and Spam
By
Agent_Kendt,
Posted on: 2007-08-07 13:34 in News, Events and Announcement Discussion
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The guy said he bought account for wings which we all know any level 1 can now get.
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HOW does a lvl 1 get wings without a vet reward?
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By someone handing them the recipe, salvage, and influence. Wings are not capes or auras - no level restriction.
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Well, I was about to make a sarcstic response about a lvl 1 not being able to craft the recipe, but I did a quick check with my SG buds and learned that it actually is possible.
Guess I er... showed me. 
"OK, first of all... Shut Up." - My 13-Year-Old Daughter
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(3) RMT is potentially dangerous in an unregulated market. Also, unregulated RMT can result in people doing things like attacking account passwords to try to compromise accounts to steal items, or spreading viruses which drop keysniffers on systems. (Note that there are already a LOT of these spreading because of WoW - how hard would it be for virus writers to check for many games and not just WoW?)
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Keyloggers don't track what game you play, they track all the keys you type; thus they will work for all games. They can be built in to any spyware package or virus. Luckily for us gamers, it's still more profitable for our russian/chinese/korean friends to target people's paypal and banking accounts with phishing attacks than to target this audience. One of my favorite news sites mentioned a few weeks ago that someone is putting out a program to easily create new viruses, complex mutating autoupdating types and distributed botnets. Expect this kind of thing to become more common.
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I've never played an SoE game, but their exchange page makes it fairly clear what some of the major issues were. In an ideal world, I think getting rid of RMT completely might be a legitimate goal. But if you can't get rid of it, better an open, regulated, legitimate and secure market than one run by spammers and scammers underground.
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Eve Online has also done something similar to this. They allow players to trade game subscription time cards for money in game. They don't have any formal system for it, but you can usually find someone willing to give you a nice chunk of change in-game this way I've heard. No real money is changing hands directly, and people can use in-game currency to play the game for free (wish my rent worked that way, hah!).
Debt is temporary, prestige is forever
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(7) Level restrict Peregrine Island.
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No - it can be hard enough to team with SG mates and friends as it is without adding another level-restricted zone hero side.
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Lol, I don't think teaming up with lowbees in mishes in PI is teaming up at all. But this is getting off-topic.
I'm glad you devs are aware of this. I just hope we're able to get them away soon enough before the glue is drying up and got them here forever x.x We all just have to make sure they realize there's not much money to make out of all of this "inf for money"-crap. The problem is however is that their low prices and the bigger need for inf now with the invention system, people are more tempted to support those losers by applying to their services (as in paying them for their services). With enough adolescents playing Co* and thinking the world turns around them and thus rules and social skills don't apply to them, it may be a problem to stop all of this.
However I'll keep reporting them and if you ask more from me in order to stop this, then I'll be happy to comply though, no matter how worse it looks like.
Brutes are built to kick @$�, not to save that of yours - Double Electro
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I must be either sheltered or not in game when these happen.
Has anyone noticed a patern concerning server/time/day?
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DO your characters regularly /hide?
I got one from "pkpkgliers", saying "Poor for living? Boring on leveling way? Come to [malformed URL deleted]. We are selling the cheap and fast infamy for you, and we promises the safety of your account on powerleveling. Thanks" (global name '@pkpkgsaera') They've been petitioned, /ignored, and /gignored... and I expect they'll be back as soon as they can create another account...
"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses."
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I received the same tell as srmalloy. Ignored all around and petitioned.
Thanks to everyone in getting rid of these spammers.
Lol I got 2 from pkpkg, same message.... Petitioned and ignored....
@tiggy
Beware the attack cat
The wording of at least one of the messages has me worried about phishing attempts, as well. "Promise account security for PL'd accounts."
I take that to mean they're offering to actually play your character to PL them, not offer a PLing team. THAT would a HUGE security risk.
On a tangent: It IS possible to team with high level players as an extreme lowbie and not PL. PLing, to my mind, is standing around doing nothing. I actually get in there and *FIGHT.* As long as I stay close to my mentor and make good use of my temp and vet powers, I tend to survive for a while. Good RP, good fun, and yes, maybe I'll grab a couple levels. But I don't do it to level. I do it to have *fun.* 
Debt is just a way to earn more influence legally, after all. 
Suicidal blappers rule!
Would it be possible to filter out messages that contain the URLs from these spammers? Filtering out all URLs would, of course, be a big problem for SGs and other legitimate uses, but if there was a way to block messages that contained known RMT site links - most importantly, without letting the spammer know the message was blocked - it'd help out quite a bit.
So what I thought I'd do is return and pretend I can focus on something.
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Would it be possible to filter out messages that contain the URLs from these spammers? Filtering out all URLs would, of course, be a big problem for SGs and other legitimate uses, but if there was a way to block messages that contained known RMT site links - most importantly, without letting the spammer know the message was blocked - it'd help out quite a bit.
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There is yet to be a filter created that is not easily circumvented by a spammer. Let's say you edited out 'www', people would just type 'w w w' or some other permutation. You'd see 'w w w;buyinf;com' or other mangled url's, but the message would still get across. It's the kind of thing that really requires human intervention to stop...
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There is yet to be a filter created that is not easily circumvented by a spammer. Let's say you edited out 'www', people would just type 'w w w' or some other permutation.
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That'd be why I mentioned not giving the sender of the message any indication that it had been blocked.
There's probably other flaws with that idea, though. I shouldn't suggest things on three hours of sleep.
So what I thought I'd do is return and pretend I can focus on something.
Would this be an opt-in filter?
As it stands, it would be easy to add to the existing filter - but it is an opt-in (out, rather). So they would either have to have it useless against those of us that opt-out, or it would be either a) a new opt-out, or b) a new required filter - which in turn would require more coding.
Orc&Pie No.53230 There is an orc, and somehow, he got a pie. And you are hungry.
www.repeat-offenders.net
Negaduck: I see you found the crumb. I knew you'd never notice the huge flag.
Is there any way to make a quick way to report spammers?
Part of why they get away with it is because most players don't want to be bothered with stopping what they are doing... clicking menu... Petition... select the right option... type the message... get the spammer's name right...
But if they could have a command to report spam where you can report the last person who sent you a /tell (maybe by automatically including a log) with fewer clicks, that would curb the problem drastically.
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My standard reply to a RMT spammer is to hit backspace so that you have
/t spammer,
I then put petition and remove the trailing comma
/petitiion spammer
and continue with they're spamming as subject, hit enter and the support/petition window opens. Fill in details like time/date and website they're spamming. I file them under Harrassment. Quick and effective.
Still getting spammed by seeming the same spammers that were spamming me about a month and a half ago. Even though the names have changed, they are similar. Whatever the devs are doing, it is not working. It slowed them down for a bit, but they are back pretty strong again.
have seen a rise in this spam since the free trial codes have been issued
Over the last 4ish days I've gotten about 5 spam tells (all on freedom, all during primetime). Each time I petitioned with the player name and global, and every time the player and global were different but matched (i.e. time one they were both aaaa, time two both bbbb, etc). Also all of them were from the pkpBLAH spammers (all the names started the same way, all of the messages were virtually the same, and in all they misspelled the domain name, which either means they're just idiots, or cryptic is already trying to filter them).
I think that its probably a safe bet that they're simply using the free trials to spam people. I think the free trial accounts should be massively rate throttled (for only tells, and maybe make it so that its tells to different people, i.e. so you can chat with a few friends, but you can't spam every person on freedom with your message).
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Originally Posted by ShadowNate
;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!
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The problem is that from your account you can send out free trials so they need to find the account that is sending the free trials that they are using to spam and ban THAT account. Which probably isn't as easy as it sounds.
The real problem is people who use these services. They cause the problem for everyone else. If they didn't use they they wouldn't bother everyone else.
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You can't please everyone, so lets concentrate on me.
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The problem is that from your account you can send out free trials so they need to find the account that is sending the free trials that they are using to spam and ban THAT account. Which probably isn't as easy as it sounds.
The real problem is people who use these services. They cause the problem for everyone else. If they didn't use they they wouldn't bother everyone else.
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There is also the MMORPG.com free trials right now.
Orc&Pie No.53230 There is an orc, and somehow, he got a pie. And you are hungry.
www.repeat-offenders.net
Negaduck: I see you found the crumb. I knew you'd never notice the huge flag.
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I got one from "pkpkgliers", saying "Poor for living? Boring on leveling way? Come to [malformed URL deleted]. We are selling the cheap and fast infamy for you, and we promises the safety of your account on powerleveling. Thanks" (global name '@pkpkgsaera') They've been petitioned, /ignored, and /gignored... and I expect they'll be back as soon as they can create another account...
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There is OBVIOUSLY a GAP in what ZERO Tolerance means to them and what it means to me.
I get that same tell multiple times perday and I always petition it.. and Guess [censored] what... I get that tell from the same guy the next day and the next day and the [censored] next day.
Zero Tolerance means as soon as you get 1 petition from someone and they copy and paste the damn advertisiment you [censored] BAN the account.
You dont wait several days or never bother to get them ...
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I got one from "pkpkgliers", saying "Poor for living? Boring on leveling way? Come to [malformed URL deleted]. We are selling the cheap and fast infamy for you, and we promises the safety of your account on powerleveling. Thanks" (global name '@pkpkgsaera') They've been petitioned, /ignored, and /gignored... and I expect they'll be back as soon as they can create another account...
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There is OBVIOUSLY a GAP in what ZERO Tolerance means to them and what it means to me.
I get that same tell multiple times perday and I always petition it.. and Guess [censored] what... I get that tell from the same guy the next day and the next day and the [censored] next day.
Zero Tolerance means as soon as you get 1 petition from someone and they copy and paste the damn advertisiment you [censored] BAN the account.
You dont wait several days or never bother to get them ...
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I understand your frustration - I have received these tells as well. The thing you are missing is that, while there may be zero tolerance for such things, it still requires that they go through the petition process for review, and only when the account that was petitioned is found to be guilty, do they ban the account.
The problem is, you can get a free trial from numerous places, and the ones doing the in-game advertising are probably using random info to fill in the required account info.
In short, it's not something that can be stopped easily, and even if you ban 100's of accounts from these spammers, if they make any profit from their efforts, then it is worth it to them...
Perhaps what is needed is a process where, when someone you haven't sent or received a tell from before, tries to send you one, you get a prompt "so-and-so is sending you a tell. Accept once/Accept always/Decline once/Decline always?" And based upon your answer, you never have to read any message. Of course, for your friends you can choose "accept always" and only have to deal w/ the prompt once...
We should spam the seller's email/request accounts. Let's face it, they were around before the economy but quiet... and will always be here so long as subscribers choose to use their services. They're not subtle anymore because they saw the economy and perhaps added convieniences (free trial accounts) as a boost to their business. I won't gignore anymore because they keep swithing the last characters ..
pkpkg -fytgh
pkpkg -fuctk
and frankly I need the space for stalkers. Don't ask. So. It's an irritation to us, to recieve it. I need to pay some kid to make free hotmail, gmail, and fmail accounts all day and spam these sellers service and p/o accounts with nonsense. Maybe they'll stop spamming for a day.
PKPK7765: Stupid Americans, this is the 75th email asking me if we have the teeshirt in small. We don't sell shirts!
PKPK9877: I asked the buyer how much infamy he wanted..he said 10. I said, "We don't sell that low. Has to be over 10,000 so how much?" He said "1D,10T". What is the currency conversion on that? Stupid Americans!
It's 2 am. I need sleep, huh?
Edit:Oh I get to add my new favorite email address to every useless spam-mail generating free service I know...
Not enough if NCSoft closes their accounts. They just open new globals. I've ignored several globals from the same website.
We need NCSoft to actually target their websites.
www.ssegames.com which is Shinestar Co, Ltd
www.pkpkg.com
OwnYo.com -COH Infamy Trading Center
They won't go away til NCSoft's legal dept. threatens to sue their sites.
I've been getting these harassment tells since July 20th.
Petitions are doing no good whatsoever.
Finally got my first tell on this. I of course petitioned the account right away.
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The guy said he bought account for wings which we all know any level 1 can now get.
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HOW does a lvl 1 get wings without a vet reward?
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By someone handing them the recipe, salvage, and influence. Wings are not capes or auras - no level restriction.
Orc&Pie No.53230 There is an orc, and somehow, he got a pie. And you are hungry.
www.repeat-offenders.net
Negaduck: I see you found the crumb. I knew you'd never notice the huge flag.