I was involved in some "legitimately illegal" stuff involving Everquest back in the Velious/Luclin era. I had a buddy who pioneered Paypal scamming through mass mailing people the old "re-verify your account information" email, (yes, it used to work on TONS of people). Paypal would catch on very quickly and disable the account, so it was really hard to make actual purchases from Ebay, and "pay by paypal" was virtually unknown back then, so there weren't many online stores that offered that as a payment option. It turned out the fastest and easiest way to exploit the accounts was to purchase in-game currency or character accounts for sale on Playerauctions/Ebay, because they would be delivered so quickly. At one point we literally had 1 of every class (all extremely well geared) and millions of plat on multiple servers. It actually spoiled the game for me, having it as good as I did, and ultimately caused me to quit from boredom. I felt awful for taking player accounts, but I never felt bad about taking plat farmers money. And ultimately in most cases Paypal refunds money to account holders who had their account stolen through a scam. Crazy times. I'll bet that shit is near impossible nowadays.
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