scammer got me

[Zanriel]

I'm sorry, haven't read through the whole thread, but this is common practice as a way to transfer credits between characters or factions without having to send them through the mail.

 

Say you want to transfer 8mil to your Empire character. You go on your Empire character and list an item for 8mil. Then you switch to the Republic character that has the money and purchase the item. Now the Empire character has 8mil - the listing fee (which for a cheap gray item would probably be next to nothing).

 

They've been doing this in every MMO that have public markets.

 

Unfortunately it can also be a way for gold farmers to transfer credits, which is likely the most common use for such a method.

 

Bottom line; it's most likely NOT a scam of any kind.

[CosmicCleric]

Thats fine also, have it, but it may not help someone who it falls just under the threshold, like setting a limit on pricing in the search does. The item may be 24 mil, and you have 100 mil, it doesn't pop, but if you set the search threshold to 2 mil, it won't show at all

 

Well the threshold value could be anything really. In fact, if BioWare wanted to, they could track history on items being sold, and warn if a price is WAY over the normal price. Or it could be a threshold that is a combination of a percentage of total wealth and/or an arbitrary large number, based on the level of the character and the legacy (how much wealth a person could have gained so far (50K,100K, 1M, etc.).

 

Granted, I agree, it would not be 100%, but it would be allot better than what we have now, and its something that people would expect, in the same way they expect a dialog warning when they are about to permanently delete a file from their hard drive (for example).

[beattlebilly]

No they wouldn't because there was no intent to deceive on the part of the seller or buyer.

 

If you list something for a large sum that normally goes for less that is fine. When you modify the selling price with commas, etc. with the intent to trick someone into clicking a larger amount then that is a scam.

]

 

Glad to know where people stand on that. "No intent to deceive on the part of the buyer", eh? So if you see a rare item selling for a 10th of the price it's usually listed(and has been bought) at, you wouldn't think that the person made a mistake in typing in the price, and you'd be OK with buying it?

 

Yes, they are trying to take advantage of inattentiveness and I agree that it is wrong to do so. But so are the people that will buy up something they see selling for way way cheaper than what it usually sells for: they are looking to take advantage of what is in all likelihood a mistake due to inattentiveness.

[masstershake]

I put stuff up all the time ridiculously over priced. It makes my day when someone buys it! I have yet to have someone sending me a mail saying it was a mistake. I figure they just really wanted my overpriced item.

 

I also look for stuff ridiculously underpriced and snatch it up and resell it.

Edited November 29, 2015 by masstershake

[beattlebilly]

^ That is a really sad worldview...

 

I would hope that most people would disagree with such a view, it lacks all compassion for fellow human beings.

 

There is more to life than money, anyone who doesn't see that... I feel very sad for...

 

I wonder, if you'd bought an item I accidentally set at a ridiculously low price and I contacted you about it, would you work with me on getting a more fair amount?

[Joonbeams]

I just bought 1 permarcrete for over 8mil credits.

My bad.

I knew there are scammers who pray on people's mistakes. I even fought them placing 1 item for 999999999 to have it on top of the list -so that it's red color states clearly this is the highest price. Didn't pay attention today/

 

No one will convince me that these people don't do this counting on honest mistakes.

Well, 8 mil isn't that much to me. I'll get it back selling uni prefabs next week.

Still hurts.

The thought that scumbags share the same entertainment as me: SWTOR

 

This happened to me too a while back. Swore it never would, but I was careless once, on phone, distracted, etc. Lost several million. Owned it, never once said it "needs fixing", didn't blame anyone but myself, etc. Yet "Cool kids" still had to come on and shout "it's not a scam" (people who don't understand the actual meaning of the word), and go on and on about my various "failings." Pages and pages of this. I came on here just to share and vent, not to demand changes; didn't matter. Welcome to SWTOR forums.

 

This is a scam by all definitions. And things could be done to eliminate it. Shouldn't be a dev priority in any way tho. Safeguards are in place, but require a bit more time and whatnot. If you're "always-on vigilant" it won't happen to you. So despite getting burned by this, I remain in the camp of "it's on the player." That said, sorry dude, I feel your pain (feels like a violation, not so much about the creds - more that some douche loser has them instead of you).

[Hyoga_]

]

 

Glad to know where people stand on that. "No intent to deceive on the part of the buyer", eh? So if you see a rare item selling for a 10th of the price it's usually listed(and has been bought) at, you wouldn't think that the person made a mistake in typing in the price, and you'd be OK with buying it?

 

Yes, they are trying to take advantage of inattentiveness and I agree that it is wrong to do so. But so are the people that will buy up something they see selling for way way cheaper than what it usually sells for: they are looking to take advantage of what is in all likelihood a mistake due to inattentiveness.

 

I forgot the world is fair and unicorns give everybody free rides to work everyday where they just play video games for a living. are you even reading what you are writing? If somebody posted an item and they forgot some zeros it's their fault for not paying attention. If somebody buys an item overpriced without paying attention to the price it is still their fault. nobody is scamming there. Nobody is sweet talking to you about a deal that ends up being being a scam. This is very simple. you choose the price to set the item for sell, and you also get to chose if you buy it at a price. If somebody is not able to pay attention. That is their problem.

Edited November 29, 2015 by Hyoga_

[Ratajack]

All BioWare would have to do, to honor their responsibility, is to pop up a dialog, when a purchase exceeds some threshold of total wealth of the buyer (say 25%?), so that the player can have a "Oh crap!" moment, and hit the cancel button.

 

That would alleviate someone making a mistake (and again, WE all make mistakes, nobody is perfect) and being scammed by someone doing predatory pricing. It would be a simple fix for them to do, and would make everybody happy (except for the scammers).

 

There is already a popup confirmation window for every transaction. If the buyer chooses to ignore that popup confirmation window and just click the "confirm" button, what makes you think they would actually pay attention to another popup window?

 

How far does BW, or society as a whole, have to go to "protect" people from THEIR OWN STUPIDITY AND INATTENTIVENESS?

[Andrellma]

All BioWare would have to do, to honor their responsibility, is to pop up a dialog, when a purchase exceeds some threshold of total wealth of the buyer (say 25%?), so that the player can have a "Oh crap!" moment, and hit the cancel button.

 

That would alleviate someone making a mistake (and again, WE all make mistakes, nobody is perfect) and being scammed by someone doing predatory pricing. It would be a simple fix for them to do, and would make everybody happy (except for the scammers).

 

There is ALREADY a popup for every purchase on the GTN. No need to add another one.

[Ratajack]

But that won't protect them from making a mistake, like a warning dialog would. The issue here is someone making a big price look like a small price, and someone clicking on the sale thinking they are making a small sale. A dialog would remind them that they are actually making a big sale, so that they can back out of it.

 

If the buyer sets the threshold at the level they want to pay, then they will not even have the option to purchase the insanely expensive one as it would exceed the threshold set by the buyer.

[CKNORTH]

Hmm no offence OP but the GTN doesn't have a huge learning curve.. I understand accidents happen and yes there are D-bags looking for easy credits. But unfortunately I think it falls on you that you need to pay attention, as well as make sure that what you are buying is In fact the market price. On the flip side it's no worse than someone who doesn't bother to check prices and lists something at default price, where it gets scooped up instantly. It does suck. But is it a scam? No it's just a mistake and an unfortunate one... But like I said accidents happen. But I do have empathy for you losing that much, it does suck and if I were in your shoes I would be upset as well...

[beattlebilly]

I forgot the world is fair and unicorns give everybody free rides to work everyday where they just play video games for a living. are you even reading what you are writing? If somebody posted an item and they forgot some zeros it's their fault for not paying attention. If somebody buys an item overpriced without paying attention to the price it is still their fault. nobody is scamming there. Nobody is sweet talking to you about a deal that ends up being being a scam. This is very simple. you choose the price to set the item for sell, and you also get to chose if you buy it at a price. If somebody is not able to pay attention. That is their problem.

 

"are you even reading what you are writing?" I knew exactly what I was writing, I was setting up a scenario to see what some of the others' responses would be. And I can say that I got the exact response I thought I would from that person.

 

Oh, and yay, you got my point (not being snarky at you, I'm just glad someone got it)

 

Though I am sad that the world isn't a fair place, I would love to have a unicorn to ride to work everyday <3

Edited November 29, 2015 by beattlebilly

[Tolunart]

in a real world, if I buy a can of soda for a dollar, and then find out I could buy it for 80 cents this is just a competition.

If I buy the soda for 1000$ -I've bean cheated out of app 999 dollars. And this could be reported (in my country at least)

Anyone that puts things on GTN in prices that try to look like low price but actually is not -it is a scam.

 

I've seen it for a long time. This time I fell for it. that's it

 

The guy who decided to put decimals on the GTN made credit sellers lives much, much easier.

 

It's more like this: you bought a $1 can of soda and paid with a $100 bill, but the cashier only gave you $9 change. You left the store and drank the soda, then when you got home you realized that you didn't pay with a $10 bill and the cashier may or may not have intentionally short-changed you. There isn't a lot you can do about it now, you could go back to the store and speak to a manager, but if the cashier pocketed the money there's no way to prove your case and get the money back. It's an expensive lesson to make you pay attention when buying something.

 

I always sort items by unit price, lowest to highest. To make sure of this, I click the selection until it sorts lowest first, then click it again so it sorts to highest first. Then I click a third time and I am sure that the lowest price per unit (even if every listing is one unit) is first. Then and only then do I look at the prices, never before doing this. If you're in a hurry and not paying attention, you are going to make these kinds of mistakes eventually. It's not a race, get used to doing things more slowly and carefully.

[EllieAnne]

If the cheapest on the GTN is 2,400.45 credits and the most expensive is listed at 2,400,450 credits there's really no question that someone is trying to confuse a buyer who isn't paying attention.

 

Only "scams" people who don't realize the GTN never quotes any price in thousandths of a credit.

[jamyz]

Always check prices two or three times before buying something. I know people that made the same mistakes, but with real money. Just be careful the next time

[Elly_Dawn]

it's a total scam by those wily Americans, they switched up the decimals and commas on purpose just to rip off foreigners, yep that's it...

 

honestly that's what the whole argument comes down to, but no one's saying it... some of the UK players just want BW to conform to their system to make it easier on them, forget about the American players, where the development studio is located...

Edited November 30, 2015 by Elly_Dawn

[Tolunart]

Well the threshold value could be anything really. In fact, if BioWare wanted to, they could track history on items being sold, and warn if a price is WAY over the normal price. Or it could be a threshold that is a combination of a percentage of total wealth and/or an arbitrary large number, based on the level of the character and the legacy (how much wealth a person could have gained so far (50K,100K, 1M, etc.).

 

Granted, I agree, it would not be 100%, but it would be allot better than what we have now, and its something that people would expect, in the same way they expect a dialog warning when they are about to permanently delete a file from their hard drive (for example).

 

These layers of "are you sure you want to do this" become less effective as they get deeper, however. People get used to seeing the confirmation boxes pop up and click through them without reading or thinking about them, they become just an annoyance that we turn off if we can. The security levels in recent Windows versions are like that, I actually had to turn off something because there were multiple levels of "are you sure" EVERY TIME I moved or deleted a file.

 

In this kind of environment, they just don't work very well. There are already at least three things standing between the buyer and a shady seller - the buyer can set a price limit to his search that will keep these 25,654,990 listings from displaying in the first place. He can sort the listings by unit price so that the offending listing is last and the 25,654.99 listing is first. And he can read the listing carefully before buying and see that 990 is not the same as 99.

 

Having failed to do all of these things, clicking "ok" to buy the item is just another minor annoyance that he will dodge without thinking about it. It requires major reprogramming of a system that breaks whenever someone looks at it in order to error trap the .0001% of transactions that will mostly occur anyway because someone who isn't thinking about what he is doing won't even notice for the third time that he's spending 100x more than he thinks he is.

 

In Guild Wars 2 there has been a phishing scam going around for quite a while. The scammer emails random players "This is GM_Scammyname, blah blah account will be banned blah blah log in to GW2scamsite blah blah." It's gotten so bad that a while back the devs added a bright yellow message to player-written emails "This email was sent by another player and not by a member of Arenanet Staff" or something to that effect. Every week since there has been at least one new post in the forums:

 

"I just got this email from GM_Scammyname and he said my account is going to be banned, is this real?" Along with a screenshot of the email including the bright yellow message answering their question before they even asked it. Followed by half a dozen posts pointing out that the question was already answered by the bright yellow text in the email.

 

Then there's "I accidentally deleted my toon" complaints when you're looking at the toon, a confirmation box says "Do you really want to delete TOONNAME?" and you have to type "delete" or the toon's name in order to delete it. That's not an accident.

 

There is simply no way to fix stupid when it is this determined to exist.

Edited November 30, 2015 by Tolunart

[Tolunart]

it's a total scam by those wily Americans, they switched up the decimals and commas on purpose just to rip off foreigners, yep that's it...

 

honestly that's what the whole argument comes down to, but no one's saying it... some of the UK players just want BW to conform to their system to make it easier on them, forget about the American players, where the development studio is located...

 

We're still waiting for you guys to give up on that crazy metric stuff and go back to yards and miles, gallons and bushels and so on, like any sensible person.

[RepublicDiplomat]

I use the price per unit when buying mats, That way the scrub pricers(###,###,###) get kicked to the back

[Jazulfi]

Be prepared for vultures to descend and start mocking you and claiming it isn't a scam But I feel your pain, because this happened to me too. All it takes is being on auto pilot buying mats and misreading a comma for a period and you're screwed.

 

I was out 20 mill after buying a few stacks of archaeology mats for 3mill each that I thought were 300k each... that was over a year ago and I've been super paranoid ever since.

 

I tend to report people I see trying to scam on the GTN but have no clue if it does any good.

 

This. I have done this in several games, and also sympathise with you, OP, but as Beltane says, you get burned and then become ultra-vigilant for a bit, until you're feeling snoozy (or whatever) and do it again. My classic manoeuver is to return to a game, have no idea what I'm doing, get really really excited and press all the buttons/items/etc in my inventory, then realise two days later I've used some hugely rare thing I could have sold and made my fortune. /facepalm moments.

 

But yeah, scammers, b**t**ds the lot of them, and they sting you sometimes. I send tea and *shoulder pats*.

Edited November 30, 2015 by Jazulfi

[Celise]

Sorry but if you look at the GTN listings it is beyond obvious these people are, to use your words, "deliberately trying to cheat you through active dishonesty."

 

It may be the "seller's preference" to scam but that doesn't mean it's right.

 

Yes, obviously it is the buyer's responsibility to be aware of what they're buying, but just because they slip up and accidentally buy the items people meant to confuse people with, doesn't mean it wasn't a scam in the first place.

 

We aren't talking about a case where the cheapest is 10k and someone lists an item for 500k here. We're talking about matching numbers so that the lowest and highest price look identical except for the decimal.

 

Hightlighted: Are you a mind reader and know what is in everyone elses mind at all times? or have i missed something? Because it looks like your making an unfounded opinion and as such nothing changes. you can only speak/write for yourself.

 

Bold: "We?" or you?. In any event, are you attempting to make a mountain out of a mole hill? it was a simple mistake and someone clearly does not understand that there was no scam here. there is nothing else to discuss beyond that.

 

If you are looking to make a suggestion? then make one in the suggestion box section of general discussion.

Edited November 30, 2015 by Celise

[jstankaroslo]

This happened to me too a while back. Swore it never would, but I was careless once, on phone, distracted, etc. Lost several million. Owned it, never once said it "needs fixing", didn't blame anyone but myself, etc. Yet "Cool kids" still had to come on and shout "it's not a scam" (people who don't understand the actual meaning of the word), and go on and on about my various "failings." Pages and pages of this. I came on here just to share and vent, not to demand changes; didn't matter. Welcome to SWTOR forums.

 

This is a scam by all definitions. And things could be done to eliminate it. Shouldn't be a dev priority in any way tho. Safeguards are in place, but require a bit more time and whatnot. If you're "always-on vigilant" it won't happen to you. So despite getting burned by this, I remain in the camp of "it's on the player." That said, sorry dude, I feel your pain (feels like a violation, not so much about the creds - more that some douche loser has them instead of you).

 

you are very close to my feelings here.

The most sad in this is: such people play our game too.

 

Just to turn this thread a bit from scam/not scam word battle: what kind of people play this game.

 

Last month I met someone I knew only from their GTN listings. The person drew my attention because of funny name in my language, and because of their annoying listings. We sell roughly the same things, and this person is kinda competition. I personally dislike their listings as they are a bit crazy, not following current price trends etc. But still, I consider them a fair competition.

Meeting that character on fleet, just after 4.0 hit I started a conversation, just to let them know I recognize the character from GTN listings, that we're from the same country etc. I also mentioned in a casual, bit humorous way I didn't like their pricing. Honestly just wanted a small talk, maybe get to know someone I've been seeing past 2 years on GTN. The response was the most vulgar language I've ever met in this game (even in pvp), or even in any interaction on a same interest platform (SWTOR, forums etc). I literally tasted a sewer.

Point is: this was just a normal gamer, I've never seen them putting scamming prices etc. Still -the sewer attitude, sewer language.

Imagine what those scammers, or worse -credit sellers I'm sure work with some of those scammers must be like.

Try to bear it in mind when you defend their practices. Those are usually ugly people that enjoy cheating, abusing and so on. Those are not the people you would like to group with as they're are probably ninjas, spacebarers, blame all others but me douchebags etc.

 

I'm personally a bit disgusted I share the same entertainment as these kind of people.

[Beltane]

Only "scams" people who don't realize the GTN never quotes any price in thousandths of a credit.

 

And this isn't common knowledge.

 

Hightlighted: Are you a mind reader and know what is in everyone elses mind at all times? or have i missed something? Because it looks like your making an unfounded opinion and as such nothing changes. you can only speak/write for yourself.

 

Bold: "We?" or you?. In any event, are you attempting to make a mountain out of a mole hill? it was a simple mistake and someone clearly does not understand that there was no scam here. there is nothing else to discuss beyond that.

 

If you are looking to make a suggestion? then make one in the suggestion box section of general discussion.

 

Well, the neat thing about that is it goes for you too. You also aren't a mind reader and you're totally right that I can only speak for myself, and it's my opinion based off of logic and years of using the GTN that these people are scamming. Pretty obvious if you aren't just trying to be edgy, play dumb, and/or justify scamming people.

 

It is OBVIOUS. There isn't much room for "well gee, maybe someone priced this for some totally legitimate reason" when the prices of highest and lowest are odd numbers and exactly matched (3,500.45 lowest and 3,500,450 highest). Come on, don't insult your own intelligence by believing that.

Edited November 30, 2015 by Beltane

[TX_Angel]

It is OBVIOUS. There isn't much room for "well gee, maybe someone priced this for some totally legitimate reason" when the prices of highest and lowest are odd numbers and exactly matched (3,500.45 lowest and 3,500,450 highest). Come on, don't insult your own intelligence by believing that.

 

^ This...

[Callaron]

This is the type of QOL changes that we need, rather than the nerfs, etc. that Bioware prefers to give us. I've fallen for it too, losing millions and killing my interest i the game. It doesn't matter anymore for me, though. Here since beta, we're finally gone once our current subs expire.

 

^Pretty much. They could fix their crappy interface and save a lot of people a great deal of grief.

Well, except for the douches posting that stuff and getting rich from it. I'm sure those would be greatly disappointed by such a change.