Bank Bans Blizzard

Posted by Stropp on February 19, 2008

The Register is running a story on the banning of credit card transactions to Blizzard.

The Halifax bank in the United Kingdom is putting a stop on credit card transactions that are used to pay for World of Warcraft subscriptions because of the massive use of stolen credit cards. Halifax has made it quite clear that they are not blaming Blizzard or its practices for the fraud.

All is not lost for Halifax WoW players though. All a player has to do is contact the bank to allow payments to Blizzard to go ahead.

It’s interesting the timing of this story. I remember reading an article about this the other day, though I’m not sure where. Iirc, it was an interview with John Smedley of Sony Online Entertainment. In the interview he made the comment that credit card fraud costs SOE a huge amount of money.

Every time a fraudulent transaction is made with a credit card, it costs the company on the receiving end of the transaction. Not only is the amount of the purchase refunded, the company is often hit with a fine. This happens to ordinary consumers too, if they bank a cheque that is fraudulent.

This wouldn’t matter that much to companies like Blizzard and SOE if the numbers of these transactions were small. But they’re not. It sounds like there are thousands of these transactions happening each month. It would have to be costing a packet.

So what’s the reason for all this fraud?

It can’t be ordinary players. As soon as the fraud was discovered, the account would be closed and probably deleted.

The problem is the gold sellers.

I’ve never been one to really worry about people buying gold. I know a lot of people consider it cheating, but I’ve never really thought it affects the non-gold-buying player base.

The problem isn’t so much the buyers. It’s the sellers.

Gold sellers are criminals. It’s as simple as that. Even if the individual gold selling company isn’t doing anything naughty, they’re still buying gold from people who are doing illegal and unethical activities. Some of these activities are:

• Using stolen credit cards to purchase and subscribe to the game.
• Using malware to steal passwords and access player accounts. The accounts are then stripped and the gear sold for gold.
• Using gold selling websites to install keyloggers. You buy the gold and they steal it right back from you, along with all your gear.
• Joining a guild and stealing the guild bank.
• Joining groups and ninjaing the drops.

Aside from that list of evil activities, how about the gold sellers themselves?

Well just look at the activities of the people behind IGE. That is if you are able to after their lawyers get through with you. A recent post by Scott Jennings at Broken Toys about the behind the scenes activities of IGE was taken down due to the bully boy tactics of IGEs legal team. In the article, now down unfortunately, there was quite a story about the corruption of the founders of IGE. It could have been a movie of the week.

With people like these, willing to employee the tactics listed above, is it any wonder that there is so much fraud?

And just like when you were a kid and someone in the group played up, you all got into trouble. Now every WoW player who banks with Halifax has to go to the trouble to allow payments to Blizzard.

All because of gold sellers.

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