Hey there everyone, hope all is well!

Recently, I was subjected to a scam which indeed my fault as my curiosity simply got the best of me, however I never go into these decisions purely blinded by my interest in the matter, therefore I set up some pretty legit steps to protect myself so as well as telling my story, I simply wish to set up a guide in order to help the half decently repped members or donors who have access to this section (Wouldn't want to contribute to any scammers activities by posting it in the general guides section).

So, I made contact with this person regarding a 5.3 dupe which I was interested in and due to someone selling this at such a low price I was sceptical, however due to him not being the most repped and known around here I semi-understood that selling it a low price would attract him more customers in order to get more trustworthy. To reduce the doubt of him being a scammer, I spoke with the person multiple times (over the course of two weeks) and was consistently questioning and gathering information about the technique he used and ultimately managed to haggle the price down and to pay a 50% up front payment.

I paid an amount of gold that I managed to access at a relatively decent price and considering I was being bombarded by my curiosity, I decided to go for it. However, I did not go in empty handed, but I came prepared. I decided to use a free VPN which I will mention a bit later in this thread in order to log into my account following another IP. Despite this being a rather simple tactic, it allowed me entry to my account and I completed this trade successfully from this foreign IP address.

Obviously the scam occurred, however immediately I was able to fall back on the fact that I was hacked and filed a ticket to which I played dumb, simply wondering what occurred on the account. The scammer thought he was safe, however I was able to make it out to look like my account was hacked and the person who had hacked my account sent gold to a gold seller. Following this, Blizzard were more then happy to assist with the recovery of these items and to make it even more rewarding, his account was permanently banned. Score!

It's unfortunate that this happened, but I went into this with some form of protection to fall back on and it ultimately paid off to allow me to reach this success and finally alert people that this person was a scammer. To top it off I ended up selling the gold that I used in the trade for a little profit which despite not being exactly financially overwhelming, it filled me with the reward of defeating a person who was out to deceive me!



To summarize:

If you're going into a trade and you feel iffy about the seller or wish to actually protect yourself if anything has deterred your gut feeling about the situation simply question excessively. Even if you come across as annoying, it's purely for the safety of yourself and a legitimate buyer will mostly wish to provide a valid and legitimate service to which they'll attempt to provide you with the best service possible.

Go into the trade protected if you're weary that is and by doing this you can get yourself a VPN in order to log in from an alternative IP address. The VPN I recommenced is
https://www.privatetunnel.com/
. It's free but only allows 100mb of data usage (Sounds like a rip-off phone company, right?!) But in all honesty, to perform what you need to do this is more then sufficient! Simply by creating an account, you're able to log in to a list of four servers which will again be more then enough! Chose the furthest one from you, and voila! You're ready to log in.

If you log in and your account gets locked due to an IP change, that's completely fine, in fact it compliments the process and simply change the PW and resume!

Ultimately, going into these sceptical trades protected and open minded is the best thing to do and despite these being rather simple, they're certainly worth doing and will allow you a form of security when dealing with certain people.

This may have been a semi-guide mixed in with a story but I hope this may help people in the future with trading safely and as always, have a sweet day!
Stay safe in cyber space :-)


› See More: How to have some form of security when trading!