Chinese Gold Farmers have a Silver Lining

A while back, there was a credit reseller at IMVU who was very distraught because chinese gold farmer/scammers were causing her to lose huge amounts of money, and whatever she did to try and stop them barely seemed to slow them down. She lamented about it to other resellers and to IMVU, but nobody really knew what to do to help her and the response was pretty much, "that sucks."

I don't know why at that time she seemed to be the only one with this problem, but somewhat more recently it seems IMVU itself was the target of, if not the exact same people then at least the same type of fraud.

Basically the fraudsters have some kind of credit selling site. The ones I have seen all sell currency for a bunch of games...just name an online game and they probably sell currency for it. There are a lot of these sites, but after a while they all kind of look the same, like they are made from the same template. In fact, after reading up on the subject my best guess is that somebody is in the business of churning out template sites for this very thing and charging some mom and pop operation in China a fee for setting them up with one of these sites. So the mechanics behind them all is basically the same, but the people behind each site are probably different. This is why there are so many and why probably, if you managed to shut down 20 of the sites, 20 new ones would probably be in their place tomorrow.

So what happens is Joe Q IMVU User ends up on one of these sites and gives up his credit card or PayPal info (or other payment info) and hopefully (but who knows?) doesn't expose any personal info when doing this, to get some credits being sold at an amazingly cheap price. Woo hoo...cheap credits for Joe Q!

The next step is the people running this site use stolen credit card or paypal info or some method of fraudulent payment to buy credits from a legitimate credit reseller at a much higher price. (Doesn't make sense, right?) They buy these credits but not to be sent to themselves, they have them sent straight to the person who purchased from them on their site at the AMAZING REALLY LOW PRICE using a bogus email address in their paypal information.

The scammers don't really know if the credits are actually sent or not, at least not until someone complains they didn't get their credits, but I'm sure they're hoping the transactions will go through. They also sometimes buy credits directly for their own dummy IMVU mule accounts, but IMVU has made that rather difficult lately since it's so hard to transfer much of any credits if you aren't a developer.

THEN...this is where paths diverge...either the transaction is caught before payment is made, OR it is paid. If the trusted reseller misses the transaction and it is paid, then a day or several days later they will receive PayPal investigations, credit card chargebacks and PayPal reversals. This results in the reseller contacting IMVU and trying to retrieve the credits which were stolen from them, often times resulting in some very angry credit buyers who blame the trusted reseller for their woes, and not the site they originally purchased from. I think this is probably due to the fact that until recently it was IMVU itself that was the target of these scammers and the email that IMVU sends out to the buyers/victims has wording that makes sense if IMVU is selling the credits, but makes the trusted reseller sound complicit when sent out WRT third party transactions.

Whew, yeah so...it's a scary world out there for people looking to buy discounted credits right now. I think IMVU is working on a way to get these sites shut down, but I'm thinking "how in the heck are they going to do that?" I mean, these sites sell 20 different kinds of currency...if they were shut-downable wouldn't one of the other 20 games tried to do that already? Maybe not, since most if not all of them probably don't support third party resellers, in fact selling their currency is probably against their TOS, but if I'm right about some main company selling mom and pop entrepreneurs in China the template for these sites, then you can shut down all of them and tomorrow there will just be a bunch of brand new ones anyway.

So right now resellers are all reacting to this in their own ways and trying different methods to stop these transactions, stopping new user registrations to their site altogether, writing new code, whatever. Of course I'm implementing my own strategies but I think it is probably going to take nearly two months to properly implement a new system. TWO MONTHS!

This means that for most of the summer I will probably be glued to my computer, examining and paying each transaction by hand. It seems like a long time, but it's the best way to get a really good system in place. I COULD make some easier and quicker changes that would allow SOME people to be paid automatically, but that would just make the full and proper implementation take longer. *Le sigh*

The "good" news is...this couldn't have come at a better time! I mean, if there had to be a two month period where I can't leave my computer for long periods of time and I live in fear that each transaction is bogus and is going to result in chargebacks...it might as well be now! My bf has his younger daughter here for the summer and is going to be spending most of his free time taking her to softball tournaments and softball practice and sitting in the hot sun watching her play. Plus, my (post?) cancer kitty is on antibiotics for two months and needs those meds every 12 hours, so I wouldn't be able to go anywhere for more than 12 hours anyway.

And finally, the really surprising silver lining for me is that, through examining each order that comes in, the PayPal and order confirmation emails and all they contain, and visiting home pages to compare data, and searching to find past orders and even order attempts by users, I feel I've grown a lot closer to the people buying credits from me. I now know a little bit about them...where they're from, if they're buying a gift for someone. Sometimes I can tell someone is buying credits for their sweetie, who maybe lives in a different state, or a kid is visiting their father for the summer, or stealing their grandmother's credit card. Usually it's just an avatar name working its way down my gmail inbox, but for the next two months, IMVU credit sales are my own personal soap opera.

(Hey, for more info on sites that are fraudulently selling IMVU credits, please go here!)