Beware of nasty scammers in the World of Warcraft auction house. Their scam is simple – but very effective and can cost you a lot of gold.
Anyone who uses the auction house in World of Warcraft needs to be careful. There is currently a nasty scam that can cause you to lose a lot of gold and resources if you are not careful. We will tell you what the scammers are doing – and how you can protect yourself against it.
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What do the scammers do? The scammers use small amounts of resources to drive down prices in order to entice other players to sell their goods for far less than their value – and then sell them again at maximum profit.
For example, the ore bismuth currently has a market value of 39 gold per unit. This means that bismuth ores cost around 39 gold on the auction house. Some are offered for 40 gold, some for 38 gold – but everything is in that range.
If you now want to sell bismuth, the auction house will suggest the currently lowest selling price – 38 gold. This ensures that your bismuth ores are sold first.
But this is exactly the trick that some people use. They repeatedly put bismuth in small quantities on the auction house for significantly less gold – for example only 13 gold pieces. What at first glance looks like a stupid act often pays off.
Because if at that exact moment another character wants to get rid of the bismuth in the auction house, he will immediately be offered a selling price of 13 gold – a single click will then put the ore in at that price.
Since many people don’t even check whether the lowest price is an exception when selling – and you often want to sell dozens of items – you just quickly click through and accept any price.
However, this is exactly what the scammers are waiting for. They hope that you will offer your resources well below market value so that they can buy them at their “cheated” price. They then take your resources and sell them at the normal price.
The profit margin for these scams is often between 50% and 300%, depending on the size of the scam.
The trick works so well because hundreds of transactions take place in the auction house every second. After all, the auction houses of the servers in a region are (partially) connected.
Cheating is legal, only caution helps
Is this forbidden? Basically, it is probably not that, no. After all, you are responsible for the price at which you put your items on the auction house. If you just mindlessly accept the first price that is displayed, then you will probably have to live with the consequences.
The only way to effectively protect yourself against this is to quickly check all the items in the auction house every time you sell and see if one or two dealers are offering an extremely low price in order to exploit others.
If you want to sell your resources in the auction house after a long farming session, pay close attention to the price you ask for and make sure it is appropriate. With so many buyers, it often only takes a few seconds for the goods from hours of farming to go over the counter. But it is now easier than ever to earn gold with farming.