What will RMT spammers spam us with next?

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

IP bans are a bad idea.

If it's a single address, power cycle your modem and you've got a new IP.

If it's an IP block, then your neighbor down the street is banned too.

If it's a larger IP range, then an entire city, state, or even country is banned.

On top of that, using a proxy server makes it so that SOMEONE ELSE'S IP gets banned, and you just have to change the IP that the proxy is broadcasting.

As to the OP, don't forget that the mail system is NOT being removed. The people who will turn it off were never RMT customers anyways. The people who want the mails will leave the system turned on, and get the mail still.

IF the system defaults to a setting that blocks the spammers, then they'll just use trials in /local until they find their next loophole. But the mail spam will continue. The people who didn't want it in the first place will just be able to ignore it easier.

The goal of the spammer is 1) to send as many messages as possible 2) to as many recipients as possible 3) at no significant cost to himself. The spammer has never cared whether the spam is wanted, has never cared whether you're attempting to block it, has never cared whether you're willing to RMT or not. So, the spammer will not look at the filter as focusing his messages on a more receptive audience; he'll look at it as something he needs to get around in order to keep spamming everyone.

My bet's on gtells, which can be sent to offline recipients and stored just like game email, thus fulfilling the goal of as many recipients as possible. More players are offline than are online at any given time, after all. I'm not sure the new filter works for gtells, though at least gtells are blocked for free trialers... I think.

Plenty of other channels for information to flow from the spammer to us, though. Other contenders: Global channel spam (high population channels without 24/7 privileged moderation). Atlas Park/Cap au Diable local/broadcast (huge concentration of players). Server Help, Arena, and Architect channels. Cut-and-pasted AE mission arcs with popular search keywords and the RMT site name as the title. AE mission feedback spam (same as gtells except authors can't /hide). Characters with some variation of the RMT domain name as their character name, interacting in any way with a large number of players.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

OP is the R&D division for [censored].com!

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

They're professionals who do this for a living in many different games. They don't need ideas from us. They've likely been thinking about alternate methods for months or years now. I'm betting there is nothing any one of us could come up with that they haven't thought of already. It's their livelihood; they have to. They are always three steps ahead.

Canned meat?

We're talking about the kind of people who used the corpses of dead gnomes dropped from the sky to spell out their website name on the ground in WoW. They really don't need our ideas, they've likely got some really out there backup plans already.

I think you just said the same thing.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I don't think so. There's no profit for them in working around the "interest blocks", because someone who turns their spam filter on isn't going to give them money in the first place so there's no loss to them either way. It also reduces the number of P.O.'d spamees likely to report them, making their scam less prone to interference, since with lower reporting rate, their stolen accounts will last longer before being invalidated and having to be replaced.

Personally, I'll keep my email unfiltered just to act as a spam bait.

You'd think that. It looks obvious.

But it's not true of the people who spam normal e-mail addresses. They are always trying to get around spam blocks by changing the spelling or using misleading headers. The guys in game appear to work the same way.

There are plenty of differences, but they don't make as big a difference as you might think.

OK, in game spammers have to replace accounts. These accounts are expendable. They know that they will be banned, but they budget for it. An account gets banned? They break open the next box, start a new account, mash their face into the keyboard for a character name, reload their bind files, and they are back in business.

I looked at a site that sells inf and powerleveling. If they made 4 sales of their least expensive service, that would pay for a new account if they bought it from NCSoft (It would take two or three if they bought it from a place like Amazon). Most of their services would make a profit after one sale.

That is assuming, of course, that they aren't doing this on trial accounts or accounts that they have stolen from people using their service, or paid for it with credit card numbers stolen from their customers. Stolen accounts and card numbers won't last long, anyway, so there is no reason not to get them banned.

And game companies take action to block spammers, like banning accounts and preventing trial accounts from sending tells or using broadcast. Spammers find other means to reach prospective customers (and annoy everyone else). Just like spammers outside of games.

There is more at stake with internet spammers, granted. In game spammers can only pick the low lying fruit (unfortunately, there is plenty of that to be picked). The question, though, isn't "How much is at stake?" The question is "Is enough at stake to make it worth it for them?" Even if the spammer (in or out of game) only does what they claim -- buy time shares or sell inf and power leveling -- the answer is "yes."

Another reason why I think they will find another way to spam us is impulse buys. I've never bought inf, but there have been times when I've been tempted (usually when I was looking at some of the prices at WW). I'm sure that other people just like me have given in to the temptation.

As with any form of advertising, if you've seen the name of the product recently (even if it was just the e-mail header as you were deleting it as spam), you're more likely to buy it. Because of impulse buys, everyone who plays CoX is a potential customer. The spammers will keep trying to put their names in front of us.

I actually suspect that most RMT purchases are impulse purchases. I'd be lying myself if I said that I haven't thought, "that isn't very much, and if I get a one-time virtual CC number, I could snag it in no time..." Fortunately, such thoughts are always merely fleeting, and the truth of the matter is that there's not a chance in hell that it would make it past the two-second or so threshold of being only fleeting, let alone actually acted upon.

But those fleeting thoughts are exactly what RMT sellers prey on. They're hoping that if they send out enough spam, 1) people will get the impression that answering just one might not be so bad (that company has been around so long, surely they can't be that bad, and their spam is at least kind of clever and nicely worded...), and 2) that one might hit someone right at the moment that fleeting thought is going through someone's mind (maybe it's a "sign!").

I can think of several diabolical ways of continuing to get their message out. The obvious ones have already been covered. Local chat from trial accounts, gtells, etc. I honestly think that the changes to e-mail are a bad thing, because it will drive the spammers from using a means that's really not very annoying (although some try to make it sound like the end of the world) and easily reportable to other means that are much more irritating and less amenable to getting banned.

You win this thread!

I have a hard time swallowing the notion that the spammer cares that his messages may reach unwilling or even infuriated recipients. Sorry, just can't see him shedding a little tear for poor little me getting hundreds of identical copies of his spam every week even though I've never bought a thing from him.

First, a central characteristic of spamming is no additional costs or work when going from small to ginormous scales. So it makes no difference to the spammer whether he's sending one unwanted spam or millions. Never has, never will. Second, it doesn't jibe with the spammer's behavior so far. He has no problem sending you the same message, unaltered, day after day after day. He doesn't bother pruning his name lists for duplicates or deleted names. He won't remove your name from his list no matter how much you beg or threaten. Changing any of that would be work, after all. In sum, he only cares about reaching a maximum number of buyers with every disposable account, and he accomplishes that by spamming as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, as indiscriminately as possible.

It is true that the spammer's disposable accounts could get banned more quickly if he switches from Email spam to an online form of spam. Most Emails go to offline recipients, and offline players can't report spam; that changes if he starts spamming online players. That's why my bet's on /gtells. He'll be able to send about as many spams as he does now, only difference is it'll all scroll past and be gone forever once you log in any one of your alts. Saves us a ton of mouse clicks and /ignore list space, which is nice, but he still gets his spams out, so no skin off his nose. If anything, he'll be pressured to spam more frequently, and multiple lines at a time, to make sure your chat buffer fills with his spam and not someone else's.

Hehehe - yeah, the mental image is amusing. But you're missing my point - yeah, they couldn't care less whom they annoy, but my point is that we're filtering ourselves* at no cost or lost sales to them and less false target means they're less likely to be reported as fast as before meaning they'll have to break out a new account less often.


*unless the filter defaults to on, in which case ignore everything I said