The Great Crown Scam, And How to Solve it.

Sallymen

Edited to avoid name shaming. The name marked in red is the scammer.

(The legitimacy of gold to crown trading): “Discussing or conducting any type of real-money trading is prohibited by ZOS TOS and Crown Exchanges on Discord. Only trade in-game items for other in-game items (all items must be tradeable from within ESO itself). ZOS has confirmed that trading gold for crown store items is 100% allowed…” – According to the ZoS ToS
Trading gold for crowns has been in practice the minute the feature was added into the game. It was a way for players to get the crown store items they wanted without themselves using real-life currency at the expense of someone else buying crowns and selling it to them. However, trading gold for crowns is not 100% safe, and it opens the door for scammers to make empty promises and to scam people off their gold.

What happened?
On July 9th, around 15 players (including myself) were scammed by a “trusted crown seller” by the name of “[removed to avoid breaking forum rules, will be known as "KM")" who USED to sell crowns and had a positive reputation . But as I gave him the gold, he traded me and then got gold from multiple other players before leaving. There were around 15 players that day that got robbed out of their gold (Estimated to be over 3m worth) for a promise of crowns that were never delivered. (As I stated before, he was considered a trusted seller within the game until July 9th, so most people that gave him gold trusted him.)

(Attatched below are screenshots of the victims that permitted me to post their screenshots. Parts of the chat are redacted to protect identity

^ Discord conversation between player, who is referred to as, Musical and KM, they chat both via Discord and in-game chat. After no crowns were delivered, Musical attempted to contact him, but he was blocked by him.

^ Another Discord conversation.

^ A group was formed to talk about how much the scammer scammed. About 8 of us were in the group at the time.

^ My personal “transaction.” I was going to buy the new ram mount for gold.

^ Happened a day later, July 10th. Another player attempted to buy off this man but was scammed.

After this encounter, about 10 people, myself included, joined a discord voice chat to talk about what happened. We all reported this scammer via the report system. Fast forward to July 10th, the next day, He was able to scam even more players!

Suggestions on how to solve the crown scamming issue:
1. A ”Pay 4 Gift system”. When giving a gift, there is the COD gold box that is seen in the mail system. If a player pays the COD they get the item, if the COD isn’t payed within a day, the crowns get refunded.
2. Buying “crown store items are physical inventory items” (Runeboxes) that can be sold and trade through guild traders and trade window.
3. Completely remove the crown gifting system. If players continue to get scammed and the scammers are able to run free.

Why am I making this a public forum post and not email Zenimax directly?
I did email Zenimax directly, I submitted multiple tickets, and I know others have as well but the scammer is still rampant, scamming players of their gold.

This post is intended to spread awareness and to protect players within the ESO community. This post may violate the “Name and Shame “community forum rule, but I believe the community's safety and the number of victims affected outweigh the rule.

TLDR: Scammers are running rampant
Thank you for reading. I have played this game since 2016 and I wish best for the community. I refuse to not speak up and post about this.

Ackwalan

If he was a 'trusted' seller, it is possible his account was hacked.

xXMeowMeowXx

I tell people this all the time, wait till you get the crown store item first.

If they’re not willing to someone else will be. Never pay up front

May bright moons guide your path

With sufficient evidence ZOS could give the player back their gold easily. They should discipline the offender to send a clear message but the scammer will just make another account.

You should be able to get back your gold I would think....

Ratzkifal

Always have all the transaction talks in ESO, so ZOS can properly track it all. If you discuss this stuff in discord ZOS has no way of knowing if it's legit or not. Hypothetically speaking you could just name your discord account like the player you want to target and fake a conversation like that and then claim it was that player.
ZOS will never know unless you are in a server with actual ZOS members in there (which I heard there are), especially if you discuss this stuff in DMs and not on the server.

Please be careful everyone! Personally I trust my trade guild masters more than I trust randoms from a crown exchange server because trade guild masters are used to handling more gold than that on a daily basis and they haven't ran off with it yet, so why would they now.

Dusk_Coven

I recommend Crown Promissory Notes be implemented.

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

Crown Promissory Notes in denominations of 100, 1000, and 10000 Crowns.
-A Tradeable item that lets you redeem it for Crowns. This would replace gifting as the main (and insecure) way to "sell Crowns".
-Not saleable to NPC vendors.
-Redeemed by Destroying it -- so you can't "accidentally" destroy it, nor can you accidentally redeem it.
-If you can't sell it, you can just redeem it yourself. Lossless.

Sallymen

daemonios wrote: »

Sallymen wrote: »

daemonios wrote: »

[Quoted post was removed]

[Quoted post was removed]

[Quoted post was removed]

Good thing it was my in-game currency, and not real life money then! Settle down friend, this post is to spread awareness and help other players. The only money I put in this game is the occasional sub so I am not wasting my money every day into it. I posted this to help others. Thank you!

Dusk_Coven

This particular case is quite interesting because the Crown Seller in question had a history of many trades that were NOT scams, and had therefore acquired a fairly high "seller rating" on World Crown Exchange Discord.
And 3 million in in-game gold (if that's really the final total) is not that much -- not so much that I'd expect a Crown Seller who's probably moved much more than that to throw away their reputation and potential future transactions.

I hope to see more follow-up on this case, especially from ZOS or even indirectly through WCE.

Sallymen

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

I recommend Crown Promissory Notes be implemented.

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

Crown Promissory Notes in denominations of 100, 1000, and 10000 Crowns.
-A Tradeable item that lets you redeem it for Crowns. This would replace gifting as the main (and insecure) way to "sell Crowns".
-Not saleable to NPC vendors.
-Redeemed by Destroying it -- so you can't "accidentally" destroy it, nor can you accidentally redeem it.
-If you can't sell it, you can just redeem it yourself. Lossless.

Or drown you in "Are you sure you want to redeem?" windows. They already do that if you lock and item and attempt to upgrade/enchant. But that is a good idea, thank you!

xaraan

It won't help you now, but I prefer the other way that TCE does it where they have a broker that you give gold to, they hold it until you get gift,then give gold to seller. Sometimes their rates might be a bit higher than what you see on WCE, but it's worth it IMO. They've always been very professional and helpful and never had any issues. (Saw some NA/EU talk in your posts though, not sure if they do EU)

I wouldn't count on zos adding more infrastructure to a system to support it themselves and therefore take responsibility for bugs and issues and also need to be concerned with crown-gold rates, etc. It's a buyer beware system and the best method IMO is working with a guild that has a proven record. A guild like these also have a much faster response rate to issues and rate changes than zos would have.

Sallymen

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

This particular case is quite interesting because the Crown Seller in question had a history of many trades that were NOT scams, and had therefore acquired a fairly high "seller rating" on World Crown Exchange Discord.
And 3 million in in-game gold (if that's really the final total) is not that much -- not so much that I'd expect a Crown Seller who's probably moved much more than that to throw away their reputation and potential future transactions.

I hope to see more follow-up on this case, especially from ZOS or even indirectly through WCE.

Yep! That is why I posted this to begin with. This was not a random back ally trader. I saw that he had a high rank and reputation within WCE and decided to trade him. I never do crown exchange via zone chat. I talked with multiple, both inside and outside of WCE and most of the people who knew him traded him for weeks. I doubt his account was hacked because both his ingame account and discord were acting at the same time, unless it is possible that both those accounts were hacked.

Ratzkifal

[snip]

Besides, the mandatory sub system is not without it's downsides either. Just ask any formerly addicted WoW player what they think of their time playing WoW and if the money was worth spending. Any player addicted to ESO would be in the same situation with a mandatory sub and that's not all that different from the current crown crate situation - exploiting vulnerable people for profit.

[edited to remove quoted content]

Taleof2Cities

@Sallymen, though I agree with the premise of your thread, you can't name and shame players in the forums.

Please edit your images so the thread can continue ...

If on the obscure reason you don't think anything will be done through the official channels, you can PM a forums moderator or one of the Community Managers.

Ri_Khan

That's what you get for wanting to ride around on a sheep!

Seriously though, the whole gifting/gold selling/scam operation they got going on never sat well with me so I've completely avoided it. Can't say I'm surprised so many people are still having problems seeing as how the devs have done nothing about it except take everyone's money. Also wouldn't be at all surprised if there was some kind of financial loophole that's being taken advantage of.

My advice would be to stop frequenting the crown store.

xXMeowMeowXx

@Sallymen I hope you do get your gold back.

I think a COD system could work with this, as well.

Only technical issue is the crown store, so I am not sure if that could even be done.

I just wait till I have the item before paying....it has always worked for me.

[snip]
The mandatory sub system was a failure, that’s why they got rid of it compared to the current business model.

[edited to remove quoted content]

Guyle

It's fascinating that they never added a crown exchange to the game at all. Other games have exchanges for their cash shop currency and in-game currency, it's not a terribly difficult or complex thing to institute..... But really, the only reason we don't have one is because addons can't do that. If ZOS has demonstrated anything about new and innovating things in the game, it is that they will do the bare minimum amount of work, then let the players and addon developers make sense of the mess. I mean just look at the leads system.... you cannot actually see what leads you have unless you go through each antiquity on a list for each zone..... whereas an addon made that brain dead obvious necessity available within days of Greymoor's release.

shadowofnarsil

Interesting thread....I actually just very recently started selling crowns, with two transactions for over 1M total. No issues so far, and in both cases the buyers were the ones who proposed sending their entire gold payment up front. Like above, both of these transactions started in Discord, and then moved to the ingame chat for all respective parties to take screenshots before any transaction took place. My (initial) sense from Discord in general (and these transactions) is that the ‘send gold first’ (either all or half) approach seemed to be more the protocol. Whatever- I don’t plan on doing this very often, and regardless of protocol, clearly there’s risk, just a matter of where it lands.

Sallymen

Please refrain from having arguments in this post. I don't put much money on this game besides the occasional 40 dollars every other month for sub (Which is basically nothing to me but for most people in today's world climate could mean a lot!). The reason why I decided to make a post about this is to spread awareness and prevent other people from getting scammed. I am not on the forums 24/7 so I do not know or see posts like this, nor do I no life the game and know everything. I've been on and off playing this game since 2016 and all I do is do dungeons and get gold from doing trials and the occasional paid carry so the gold I got scammed of is practically nothing. But I know the gold of others mean something to them!

Based on the people I've talked to; this happens often but not a lot of people have the courage to post about this in the forums because others like to insult them and degrade them for the actions of other people. All I want to do is to make some noise so that this can be prevented!

Thank you.

PizzaCat82

I definitely agree that rune-boxes or a trade/cod spot for crowns would be great.

I trade milliions each month buying crown items and making people safer trading would make crowns more abundant.

Miliana

This is disheartening to say the least. As GM of the Tamriel Crown Exchange (TCE) even I wish there was an in game option for this. If you're going to offer a service within your game that allows people to spend their actual money, in any form, there should be measures of safety taken to prevent this kind of thing. While it may have only been in-game gold in this instance, think of the people who sent crowns first and got scammed? They're out actual money. It's disappointing there are humans out there like that.

That said, WCE offers you the choice to use a broker. This means you have a middle man to prevent things like this from happening. Yes it can take longer, but safety is worth the wait, is it not? That's why TCE requires brokers be used when trading with both new sellers and any large transactions, as well as keeps an insurance fund should a scam occur. We are fortunate enough that there have been 0 scams in TCE since opening in 2018, but that doesn't mean something like this can't happen to us too. Wherever you buy your crowns, do your homework and be safe. If you're going to use WCE, just request a Broker, it's not too hard and saves you the stress of a scam.

Hopefully one day ZOS will implement an in game system to solve these issues.
-Milianaa (GM of Tamriel Crown Exchange)


Discord.gg/TCE

SirLeeMinion

A secure method for trading crowns has been requested by players and ignored by ZOS since the system was first implemented. Players scamming players for gold or crowns was predicted when the system first appeared on the PTS, and it has happened from the very beginning. Independent discord servers and trading guilds have helped, but clearly not fixed the problem. A player acting as a broker can scam someone just as easily as a trusted discord seller can. Further, it is challenging to get a broker, a buyer, a seller, an agreed upon rate of exchange, and a mutually acceptable division of brokerage fees all in place in a reasonable amount of time. Even Eve Online, an MMO that prides itself on encouraging player versus player theft and scams, has a more secure system.

It is a poor reflection upon ZOS that they knowingly implemented a system that promotes scams and have made no effort to improve upon it.

Rukia541

They really just need to implement the token system WoW has to prevent this . I use TCE and I never had issues.

I doubt he's 'hacked' , some people just decide to scam one day, probably a young kid that wants a big payoff. Lol @ 3 mill tho that aint ***.

volkeswagon

I shake my head at people who knowingly scam others. How does someone live with themselves being such a social deviant. And what happened to instilling values into people as children so they grow up into decent people instead of criminals. I only buy or sell within guild walls amongst people i know. I always ask for gold up front if I sell because my crowns are bought with real money I worked for. Game gold is fake. When I buy crowns I send money first. Some do half before and half after. In this case something smells fishy. I smell a hack or another issue . I do like the COD idea. That would solve all of this

Knightpanther

They should just implement the system used by GW2, some company's are so far ahead of ZOS its embarrassing.

Be Safe

Vaoh

How to solve the problem:
—> Allow Crowns to be traded for Gold
OR
—> Allow the gift sender to Request Gold in order for the gift recipient to accept the gift

Wow look now zero people are getting scammed and the business is a million times more trustworthy

volkeswagon

Vaoh wrote: »

How to solve the problem:
—> Allow Crowns to be traded for Gold
OR
—> Allow the gift sender to Request Gold in order for the gift recipient to accept the gift

Wow look now zero people are getting scammed and the business is a million times more trustworthy

yes, lets get this into the game

Quantact

I played this game for years. I was scammed by people I thought were my guildies, I was scammed by a guy I thought was my friend, and eventually I got into a good crowd and they're really grateful for the help I try to provide, and I am grateful that they're good to me.

There is no computer system that replaces trustworthy people. Have the common sense not to do business for virtual currency worth a lot of money with total strangers without some mechanism in place that'll keep you from getting scammed.

Tigerseye

They should just introduce a similar system to the one they have in GW2.

A currency exchange, which fluctuates somewhat according to supply and demand.

It's all automated, so you don't have to deal directly with the other player (so it's safe) and the games company gets a small cut with each transaction.

Everyone wins.

Ackwalan

Just put a tradable coin in the crown store, that when used, is worth 499 crowns. That way people can put them in guild stores, mail them COD, or put them in a trade window.

idk

Sallymen wrote: »

Edited to avoid name shaming. The name marked in red is the scammer.

(The legitimacy of gold to crown trading): “Discussing or conducting any type of real-money trading is prohibited by ZOS TOS and Crown Exchanges on Discord. Only trade in-game items for other in-game items (all items must be tradeable from within ESO itself). ZOS has confirmed that trading gold for crown store items is 100% allowed…” – World Crown Exchange Discord Rule #6
Trading gold for crowns has been in practice the minute the feature was added into the game. It was a way for players to get the crown store items they wanted without themselves using real-life currency at the expense of someone else buying crowns and selling it to them. However, trading gold for crowns is not 100% safe, and it opens the door for scammers to make empty promises and to scam people off their gold.

Actually, Zos forbids trading real-world money for anything in the game. Zos has specifically stated this even in the forums when talking about trading crown store items for in-game gold. The difference according to Zos is we are not trading crowns for in-game gold but are trading crown store items for in-game gold.

I thought I would set the situation straight.

Also, there are steps one can take to protect the trade that I would expect one could find that information on the crown trading discord as it is widely known. To me, it makes sense to seek some sort of protection when trading with a complete stranger. However, that might just be me.

In the end, sorry you got scammed. Report them to Zos with screenshots, making sure they know you have more SS. Zos has been known to go after the cameras. Sometimes they do work to make the scammed whole but when they do it seems to be a one time only as they seem to expect players to learn from their experiences. Good luck.

Fischblut

While it may have only been in-game gold in this instance, think of the people who sent crowns first and got scammed?

Only gold?.. So you think it's not a big deal if somebody lost their gold?
Gold is just as valuable as crowns. Scam is always a crime, and nobody deserves to be scammed.

Based on the people I've talked to; this happens often but not a lot of people have the courage to post about this in the forums because others like to insult them and degrade them for the actions of other people. All I want to do is to make some noise so that this can be prevented!

@Sallymen I bought many, many gifts since we got this gifting system in 2018 - and most of them were from random people in zone chat. Only two times I was scammed during all this time. Most of people in game are good

But I blame victims only if they remain passive and decide not to report scammer. Scammers must be reported properly, no matter the amount of crowns/gold lost. If somebody was scammed and does nothing afterwards, thinking "It's my fault for being scammed" - they allow scammer to keep playing and maybe keep scamming more people.
Developers don't know that there was scam until this scam is reported. So until we got safe system, always state in game chat what you buy/sell and for how much, and other person needs to confirm that they agree. Technically, it's enough - chat history will be saved on server, and available for investigation in case of scam. But if you also take screenshots/record video of trade, you simply make it easier to investigate for a support team. And it's good to keep for history.

Scam is violation; normal people don't scam - so I have no sympathy for people who defend scamming by saying that it's natural or that it's okay to lose gold.

How I would make trading currencies safe: allow to place crowns in trade window, just as we can place gold there Easy.

I also like GW2 converting system, but it wouldn't be as easy to implement in ESO as simply adding crowns to trade window, I think...

Kiyakotari

Sallymen wrote: »

[...]this post is to spread awareness and help other players.

Oh, [insert expletives I cannot use on the forums here], @Sallymen , I just saw that you were the OP of this thread! I'm sorry this happened, and I'm really glad that you've outlined the problem (which I fully agree needs to be addressed) and proposed some ideas of how ZOS might fix it. The community has been trying to deal with this for a while without consistent support from the company that runs the game and creates these systems. They should either adjust what they implemented to fix the problems that have become apparent now that it has been out for a while, or admit it's not working as it is, and roll it back.