I'm not sure what exactly you guys are doing as a company to shut these websites down but they are obviously causing us alot of annoyance, in addition to sending out phishing emails stealing peoples accounts which causes you guys more work and may cause you guys to hire more customer service reps. I'm guessing they are also committing credit card fraud since they are reactivating peoples accounts to use them to farm/spam/transfer.

Normally we only get about one gold farmer per hour spamming trade chat. But Sunday, it was constant and in every single chat channel. All day and all night. In order to participate in any channel, we had to keep hitting report spam.
When I say constant I mean, the gold farmers were talking in the channels more than anyone else, and ghostlands has a pretty active trade chat lol. Each spammer spams their big paragraph in general, trade, guildrecruitment, local defense, lookingforgroup, and say. So if you happen to be in those channels, you are flooded with text just from one spammer. And it was nonstop spamming all day and all evening.

[Yes i know there is an addon to block spam, but I try to run as little addons as possible to reduce lag & issues.]

In addition to that, all weekend I have been receiving phishing emails, every hour. Gmail thankfully marks them all as spam for me, but I was wondering why I had 100 spam emails in 2 days. I forwarded one of them to hacks@blizzard.com with the full headers.


Its beyond ridiculous right now. And it's the same 3 websites doing the advertising. It's been the same 3 websites advertising for at least a year now. Many people complained about it in-game today and I know you guys have been getting complaints about it for a long time, but the problem has just gotten worse. Is anything being done at all to combat this besides telling us to report it and try to "ignore" it?

We don't want you to ignore them at all - we want you to report-spam by right clicking the player name and choosing that option.

That will instantly block any further communication from that account for the duration of your login as well as report them.

As to 'shutting them down' - love to. If you have any recommendations on how to do that when most of these come from countries that are virtually the wild-west of the internet and don't have any regard whatsoever for international laws or intellectual property rights, I'm sure we'd love to hear them.

Not dealing with them as customers is the way to put them out of business. Buying gold and services is NOT a 'victimless crime'. Don't do it - and don't let friends or guildies do it - or at least try to educate them on why it's a VERY bad idea.

Trafficking in illicit virtual goods and accounts is a multi-BILLION dollar a year business.

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Q u o t e:
Even if we manage to reduce gold buying, those spammers will still be out there.

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Do you really think they would exist if they had no market?