Just what is fraudulent behavior exactly?

ldzlcs065

Seems ZoS repeated this word a lot, but never give an exact definition. So just what count as fraudulent behavior? What kind of behavior it is that ZoS intend to prevent specifically?

wilykcat

A synonym for fraudulent is dishonest or untrue. So fraudulent behavior is when someone is acting or doing something that is dishonest.

For video games fraudulent behavior is:
cheating, hacking, using bots, scamming, phishing, and getting away with breaking any other rules. More information about this can be found in the Code of Conduct, community rules, tos, etc.

I'll let someone else who knows more information, such as a moderator, to explain this further and to clarify.

TaSheen

Unlikely they'll give any specific info. There are constraints.

PieMaster1

wilykcat wrote: »

A synonym for fraudulent is dishonest or untrue. So fraudulent behavior is when someone is acting or doing something that is dishonest.

For video games fraudulent behavior is:
cheating, hacking, using bots, scamming, phishing, and getting away with breaking any other rules. More information about this can be found in the Code of Conduct, community rules, tos, etc.

I'll let someone else who knows more information, such as a moderator, to explain this further and to clarify.

Are they doing the gift blocking because of actual RMT morons half a world away like gold sellers/fraudulent chargeback organizations? Or is this because of people ripping each other off? As in, they gave you crowns but they didn't give you gold in return

I wonder if this has anything to do with the gold sellers that have been popping up since the epic games free to play. Make fake accounts, buy crowns, sell crowns for gold, chargeback crowns, proceeds to sell all that gold in the form of bot sellers

TaSheen

CreamedPieYum wrote: »

Are they doing the gift blocking because of actual RMT morons half a world away like gold sellers/fraudulent chargeback organizations? Or is this because of people ripping each other off? As in, they gave you crowns but they didn't give you gold in return

I wonder if this has anything to do with the gold sellers that have been popping up since the epic games free to play

Probably. They really shouldn't have dont that whole Epic thing. Some of us who've been around forever.... eh, we had the shudders.

majulook

I also have seen a dramatic increase in gold seller, and WTB / WTS Crowns in zone chat the past couple of weeks. Maybe or maybe not related to this.....

What ever it was it must have been big for ZOS to take this action. Surely they knew the Player base would not be happy.

Lags

from everything ive heard its probably people getting crowns cheaper somehow, possibly living in countries where they are much cheaper, and then selling them to other players via gifting for a profit, while still being cheaper than the crown store. Or maybe they are getting them for free somehow, but i find the first possibility more likely considering, from what ive heard, its been happening for a long time now. But this is just a guess, nothing will be confirmed til they want to confirm it.

rpa

They will not tell. Selling gold from crowns bought with stolen credit cards is just a guess. If that happened to be the problem, card owners will get refund eventually and store gets shafted with extra costs from it.

Azphira

Selling proprietary currency to cloud a customer's awareness they are spending too much?

darvaria

They should just eliminate purchasing on VPN's. Eliminate brand new accounts from buying any crowns. And should have never sold crowns at a cheaper price. Crowns should be the same price, no matter your location. Why on earth would you be catering to some 3rd world economy and selling them for a cheaper price? You should not cater to countries where the standard living is such that you need to sell crowns at a cheaper price. If they have a financial situation where they are that much lower than your main player base, they are only buying these crowns to try and make a profit. There is an easy termination to this ..........

And you should only be selling to verified purchasers. Take myself for example, ZOS can pretty much examine my purchase behavior and see I have been a consistent crown purchaser. If you are selling crowns to some F2P lvl 1, then what do you expect? This problem could be easily solved. Just put a gift price on an item. Let the crown seller just sell them outright. None of this shifty gift buying. AND, just sell bags of gold in the Crown Store. I hate to see rw trading for gold in a game. I have read repetitively, this money is often going to support nefarious activities. I feel you are opening the door for more rw gold selling.

The problem is the price of crowns is variable, when it would take only a few steps to change this. Let the players sell the actual item and put a price on these items. The item would not change hands unless the buyer handed over the set price.

Ridiculous that you are punishing players like myself and that I won't be using the Crown Store (unless you just sell gold outright).

I want someone in ZOS to review my account and see that amount of crowns I have purchased since 2016 (around $14,000 US). AND, I have NO buyer's remorse in my purchases. In fact, this is one of my husband's favorite gifts and he loves to surprise me with a little card "Honey go buy yourself 21,000 crowns". He even follows the game site to see when they are on sale (he never plays). The loss of such a revenue stream is beyond anything a smart marketing and financial business would even consider. I don't log on for months at a time, but keep my sub rolling in order to have a nice little supply of crowns, when I return (I have 55K crowns atm and have had more at times).

boi_anachronism_

darvaria wrote: »

They should just eliminate purchasing on VPN's. Eliminate brand new accounts from buying any crowns. And should have never sold crowns at a cheaper price. Crowns should be the same price, no matter your location. Why on earth would you be catering to some 3rd world economy and selling them for a cheaper price? You should not cater to countries where the standard living is such that you need to sell crowns at a cheaper price. If they have a financial situation where they are that much lower than your main player base, they are only buying these crowns to try and make a profit. There is an easy termination to this ..........

And you should only be selling to verified purchasers. Take myself for example, ZOS can pretty much examine my purchase behavior and see I have been a consistent crown purchaser. If you are selling crowns to some F2P lvl 1, then what do you expect? This problem could be easily solved. Just put a gift price on an item. Let the crown seller just sell them outright. None of this shifty gift buying. AND, just sell bags of gold in the Crown Store. I hate to see rw trading for gold in a game. I have read repetitively, this money is often going to support nefarious activities. I feel you are opening the door for more rw gold selling.

The problem is the price of crowns is variable, when it would take only a few steps to change this. Let the players sell the actual item and put a price on these items. The item would not change hands unless the buyer handed over the set price.

Ridiculous that you are punishing players like myself and that I won't be using the Crown Store (unless you just sell gold outright).

I want someone in ZOS to review my account and see that amount of crowns I have purchased since 2016 (around $14,000 US). AND, I have NO buyer's remorse in my purchases. In fact, this is one of my husband's favorite gifts and he loves to surprise me with a little card "Honey go buy yourself 21,000 crowns". He even follows the game site to see when they are on sale (he never plays). The loss of such a revenue stream is beyond anything a smart marketing and financial business would even consider. I don't log on for months at a time, but keep my sub rolling in order to have a nice little supply of crowns, when I return (I have 55K crowns atm and have had more at times).

Its not 3rd world contries....its exchange rate. Whats totally fine for cost of living in some countries doesnt translate well in us dollars. It doesnt mean they live in poverty... oiy

f047ys3v3n

There has certainly been a lot of fraud. This being players advertising crowns for gold in zone chat and then taking the gold and running without delivering the crown item paid for. I'm sure this has been a huge source of headache for the customer support team trying to sort out and punish the bad actors.

Of course, that fraud could be easily solved by allowing crowns to be directly tradable in the in-game trade menu. This sort of thing is easy enough to do. I understand it is not uncommon for MMO's to do this. From my stand point it would be great as I have a bunch of gold that would be best used converted to crowns safely and I never have very many crowns as I don't purchase any crowns outside of my sub on principle.

What is not easy to do is to prevent the acquisition of crown items purchased with low cost developing country crowns from being transferred to developed country accounts where they cost many times as much. This appears to have become quite common and I suspect it is the largest motivation for the end of gifting. I'm sure this practice is a substantial drain on revenue or at least ZOS thinks it is. Corporations often make the mistake of thinking that digital items gained through less preferred but cheaper means would be purchased at full cost if the alternate means were not available. Regardless, I agree with ZOS implied estimation that the gifting system is probably costing more revenue than it is generating and this is not easy to prevent shy of making some crowns more equal than others or literally having a tariff system. As amusing as that would be I think they would rather just disable all gifting and trading than put a spot light on the underlying price differences.

zaria

CreamedPieYum wrote: »

wilykcat wrote: »

A synonym for fraudulent is dishonest or untrue. So fraudulent behavior is when someone is acting or doing something that is dishonest.

For video games fraudulent behavior is:
cheating, hacking, using bots, scamming, phishing, and getting away with breaking any other rules. More information about this can be found in the Code of Conduct, community rules, tos, etc.

I'll let someone else who knows more information, such as a moderator, to explain this further and to clarify.

Are they doing the gift blocking because of actual RMT morons half a world away like gold sellers/fraudulent chargeback organizations? Or is this because of people ripping each other off? As in, they gave you crowns but they didn't give you gold in return

I wonder if this has anything to do with the gold sellers that have been popping up since the epic games free to play. Make fake accounts, buy crowns, sell crowns for gold, chargeback crowns, proceeds to sell all that gold in the form of bot sellers

I think your late paragraph show how it was done, I thought stolen card but cargeback is so much simpler and mostly legal.

BlueRaven

The speculation in our Discord was that it concerned the free accounts via the Epic Store.

People making new accounts, selling crowns (or laundering gold), then deleting accounts, most likely.

Keep in mind, “speculation”.

Grizzbeorn

BlueRaven wrote: »

The speculation in our Discord was that it concerned the free accounts via the Epic Store.

People making new accounts, selling crowns (or laundering gold), then deleting accounts, most likely.

Keep in mind, “speculation”.

How long has Epic been a thing in with regard to ESO, though?
Because you have to wait 30 days once you buy crowns on a new account before gifting is unlocked.

Unless they have changed that, recently.

BlueRaven

Grizzbeorn wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

The speculation in our Discord was that it concerned the free accounts via the Epic Store.

People making new accounts, selling crowns (or laundering gold), then deleting accounts, most likely.

Keep in mind, “speculation”.

How long has Epic been a thing in with regard to ESO, though?
Because you have to wait 30 days once you buy crowns on a new account before gifting is unlocked.

Unless they have changed that, recently.

True, but the free give away of eso happened on the Epic store roughly a month ago.

https://bethesda.net/en/article/4fRFXwXVjdnigSUsNM7AX8/get-the-elder-scrolls-online-free-for-a-limited-time-on-the-epic-games-store

So the “dirty deeds” may just start being felt now.

PrincessOfThieves

Yeah, looks like this Epic promotion did more harm than good. Insane queues, godlseller spam, now this...

Ragnarok0130

BlueRaven wrote: »

Grizzbeorn wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

The speculation in our Discord was that it concerned the free accounts via the Epic Store.

People making new accounts, selling crowns (or laundering gold), then deleting accounts, most likely.

Keep in mind, “speculation”.

How long has Epic been a thing in with regard to ESO, though?
Because you have to wait 30 days once you buy crowns on a new account before gifting is unlocked.

Unless they have changed that, recently.

True, but the free give away of eso happened on the Epic store roughly a month ago.

https://bethesda.net/en/article/4fRFXwXVjdnigSUsNM7AX8/get-the-elder-scrolls-online-free-for-a-limited-time-on-the-epic-games-store

So the “dirty deeds” may just start being felt now.

Yes but this issue pre-dates the Epic free accounts by a long time so it's unlikely to be related. Epic may have exacerbated the issue in some way but it's certainly not the cause.

Grizzbeorn

BlueRaven wrote: »

Grizzbeorn wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

The speculation in our Discord was that it concerned the free accounts via the Epic Store.

People making new accounts, selling crowns (or laundering gold), then deleting accounts, most likely.

Keep in mind, “speculation”.

How long has Epic been a thing in with regard to ESO, though?
Because you have to wait 30 days once you buy crowns on a new account before gifting is unlocked.

Unless they have changed that, recently.

True, but the free give away of eso happened on the Epic store roughly a month ago.

https://bethesda.net/en/article/4fRFXwXVjdnigSUsNM7AX8/get-the-elder-scrolls-online-free-for-a-limited-time-on-the-epic-games-store

So the “dirty deeds” may just start being felt now.

I've seen it stated in one of the threads on the topic that the fraudulent behavior has been a thing on PC since April, and was noticed on consoles in early July. All of that pre-dates ESO via Epic.

Braffin

Grizzbeorn wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

Grizzbeorn wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

The speculation in our Discord was that it concerned the free accounts via the Epic Store.

People making new accounts, selling crowns (or laundering gold), then deleting accounts, most likely.

Keep in mind, “speculation”.

How long has Epic been a thing in with regard to ESO, though?
Because you have to wait 30 days once you buy crowns on a new account before gifting is unlocked.

Unless they have changed that, recently.

True, but the free give away of eso happened on the Epic store roughly a month ago.

https://bethesda.net/en/article/4fRFXwXVjdnigSUsNM7AX8/get-the-elder-scrolls-online-free-for-a-limited-time-on-the-epic-games-store

So the “dirty deeds” may just start being felt now.

I've seen it stated in one of the threads on the topic that the fraudulent behavior has been a thing on PC since April, and was noticed on consoles in early July. All of that pre-dates ESO via Epic.

Yeah, this problem has nothing to do with epic but first-worlders using vpn to buy cheap crowns in less developed countries.

Thanks to all the cheapskates and hardcore FOMOists for destroying the system for all of us.

Lozeenge

prior evidence suggests that people are laundering stolen money using the in-game currencies. happens in more games than you think but it was so easy to do it in ESO because exchanging currencies was never officially supported by the game. this inevitably snowballs into VPN abuse, botting, you name it.

who knows how long this has been happening behind close doors. ZoS definitely didn't know until players began filing complaints after bots began spamming zone chats, otherwise they might've taken a more careful approach than just pulling the handbrake on gifting.

code65536

BlueRaven wrote: »

Grizzbeorn wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

The speculation in our Discord was that it concerned the free accounts via the Epic Store.

People making new accounts, selling crowns (or laundering gold), then deleting accounts, most likely.

Keep in mind, “speculation”.

How long has Epic been a thing in with regard to ESO, though?
Because you have to wait 30 days once you buy crowns on a new account before gifting is unlocked.

Unless they have changed that, recently.

True, but the free give away of eso happened on the Epic store roughly a month ago.

https://bethesda.net/en/article/4fRFXwXVjdnigSUsNM7AX8/get-the-elder-scrolls-online-free-for-a-limited-time-on-the-epic-games-store

So the “dirty deeds” may just start being felt now.

That seems unlikely.

Keep in mind that gifting is not automatically enabled. In order to enable gifting on an account, you must either subscribe to ESO+ or buy a crown pack, and then wait 30 days.

Yes, ZOS had put in safeguards.

Of course, a nefarious actor can work around these weak safeguards. They could buy a crown pack via legitimate means and wait 30 days (if they did it illegitimately, it would likely be detected by the card issuer and their account banned before those 30 days are up), and then they can use it to acquire and trade illegitimate crowns.

But the point is, there is already a cost that they must incur (legit crown pack and 30-day wait), and a little extra cost in the form of the base game (which often goes on sale for $5 to $7) isn't likely to figure much into their math, when we're talking about potentially hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of fraud.

SeaGtGruff

The Epic Games Store giveaway was fine. There were gold sellers before that. Besides, if a criminal is making a ton of money through their activities, having to spend a little money to keep making a lot more money is no big deal to them, so there's no need for them to wait until whatever game they're targetting becomes temporarily available for free.

PrincessOfThieves

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

The Epic Games Store giveaway was fine. There were gold sellers before that. Besides, if a criminal is making a ton of money through their activities, having to spend a little money to keep making a lot more money is no big deal to them, so there's no need for them to wait until whatever game they're targetting becomes temporarily available for free.

True, but now the barrier is lower than ever. Yes, there were always goldsellers, but I haven't seen this amount of shameless spam in zone chats for many years. That could only mean that they have enough throwaway accounts to not care about them getting blocked.
If ZOS would increase the requirements to sell large amounts of crowns (for example, make it so that only older, high cp accounts can sell unlimited crowns and the new accounts can only sell their ESO+ crowns, 1650 per month), it would not prevent all scams, but would make it more trouble than worth for the majority of scammers.

irswat

There are definitely some suspicious crown sellers on world crown exchange discord.

wilykcat

I don't trust discord at all. So it's social media that has them all. I always knew they are sus.

My guess is that there are possible undercover employees in those social media groups(for crown and gold sellers) appearing to be interested players as part of the investigation. But who knows. 🤷‍♀️

code65536

irswat wrote: »

There are definitely some suspicious crown sellers on world crown exchange discord.

I poked around and looked. And in the seller-advertisement channel, the last message before the shutdown of crown gifting was this:

• Selling crowns on all platforms? Red flag
• Over 100K crowns to sell? Red flag
• Selling at a price that's almost half of the price of the more thoroughly-policed TCE? Red flag
• Claiming to be online 24/7? Yea, there's no way that this is a real player

Suspicious is an understatement. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that this is illegitimate.

SeaGtGruff

PrincessOfThieves wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

The Epic Games Store giveaway was fine. There were gold sellers before that. Besides, if a criminal is making a ton of money through their activities, having to spend a little money to keep making a lot more money is no big deal to them, so there's no need for them to wait until whatever game they're targetting becomes temporarily available for free.

True, but now the barrier is lower than ever. Yes, there were always goldsellers, but I haven't seen this amount of shameless spam in zone chats for many years. That could only mean that they have enough throwaway accounts to not care about them getting blocked.
If ZOS would increase the requirements to sell large amounts of crowns (for example, make it so that only older, high cp accounts can sell unlimited crowns and the new accounts can only sell their ESO+ crowns, 1650 per month), it would not prevent all scams, but would make it more trouble than worth for the majority of scammers.

Well, I haven't seen any gold-and-Crowns sellers in chat for about a week now.

For a while I was seeing them several times a day on both servers (PC NA and PC EU). But during the past week they seem to have stopped.

Maybe I've just got them all on ignore, but I was having to add new accounts to my ignore list three or more times a day, and now there's been nothing.

Or it might be that I've gotten lucky and just haven't been on when they've been spamming chat. But the times of day when I'm playing ESO haven't changed.

I'm hoping that either ZOS has been able to recognize patterns in either the account names, character names, or chat text, and are now able to ban them more quickly, or else the authorities in whatever countries they were running their operations in have caught up with them and shut them down, or something.

Aka_

Until ZoS makes an official explanation, we won't truly know. And I doubt we will ever know. I would appreciate being proven wrong

Vulkunne

ldzlcs065 wrote: »

Seems ZoS repeated this word a lot, but never give an exact definition. So just what count as fraudulent behavior? What kind of behavior it is that ZoS intend to prevent specifically?

The way I look at it, is it isn't that it's really 'fraudulent' like as the common man would read it, its more like 'Fraudulent' as the Legal Team would say.

rpa

There was a small spike of gold spammers for a while but I too have not seen any for a week or so.