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Old 08-12-2010, 05:08 PM
Japan Japan is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: las vegas, nv
Posts: 247
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Experience as a guide taught me that, circa 2001, GM tools were extremely time-consuming, and when stolen money was laundered through multiple accounts most GMs would give up on finding the culprit and just restore the plaintiff's assets without addressing the problem. So the worst thing I did was a little social-engineering exploit:

I looted a couple of friends' accounts using a brand-new account to launder all the items, then passed all the loot to my own dummy second account. I sold everything, and traded the money directly to my main account. This first stage I seriously fucked up - I could easily have just sold the items directly from my friends' accounts and thereby had another layer of money laundry. But ultimately, all their items got restored, and no accounts associated with the supposed scam were penalized in any way. I decided, based on this, that only one layer of obfuscation would be required in the future.

Months later I traded all the cash to a friend's abandoned account, purchased gear with it and levelled a twink for a few days. I then changed this account's password from a different IP, sold all the gear, traded the plat to a dummy account, and then traded the plat again to my main account. I reported the gear off the abandoned account stolen and had it restored.

At this point over a million plat in gear had been duped for me - TWICE - by GMs.

A few months' cool-off later I sold the remaining duped gear, traded it to my main account, and all my profits were now liquid asset. I decided to go double-or-nothing, and spent all of the about 2.5million plat I had on an extremely twinked shaman-monk 2-box made on friends' longstanding abandoned accounts. I levelled these to about 40 (with druid PL). Then I "ripped off" the imaginary player of these accounts by again changing the password and selling everything, this time splitting the money into a many small blobs (I was paranoid there was some kind of "huge transaction" detector built into the GM tools) of plat and trading them through the original laundry account and back to my main.

I had the items restored, putting me up about 5,000,000pp from the start of this scam. However, the same GM had been responsible for the last two dupes, and hinted that he was on to me by indicating a full investigation would be warranted if these incidents continued on my server. I split about a million, total, between the friends who had invested in this scam, ebayed about 2,500,000pp, kept the rest, and lived the rest of my EQ life a rich man.