Interview With a Scammer

The fol­low­ing is an inter­view I had with a scam­mer. He/she con­tacted me after read­ing the scammed sec­tion on the site, prais­ing PPT, but also want­ing to con­tribute to the com­pi­la­tion of arti­cles in rela­tion to scam­ming. The main con­cern, that most of the scams pre­sented on PPT did not know how to spell cor­rectly. This inter­view how­ever, gives us an insight into why a per­son may scam. What leads a per­son to scam­ming and how some peo­ple scam. What­ever you may read this for, this inter­view holds within itself impor­tant infor­ma­tion on how not to get scammed.

Q. How long have you been scam­ming on Neopets?
About one year.

Q. Why did you begin scam­ming on Neopets? Were you a once-victim or did you fall on it for the sheer thrill of scam­ming?
I started play­ing Neopets when it first started. I had a fairly wealthy account and a strong pet.

I was buy­ing some items on the shop wiz­ard one day when I came across a shop with faeries sell­ing for twenty-five Neo­points. My first thought was, “Wow those are cheap!” So I went and mad-clicked. It came to a login page, not think­ing I typed my user­name and pass­word in. And about a minute later my account was taken from me. I logged onto my sec­ond account, and checked out my shop. The scam­mer had placed the fake faeries in it. I reported my own shop, so my items would not be touched. It was frozen within minutes.

I pleaded with Neopets for weeks to give the account back, but they never did. I quit Neopets for a few weeks. I returned to it, and began fid­dling around with html. I made a login page, signed up with a mail-form ser­vice, found a place that allowed you to make web-pages with­out those annoy­ing ads, and viewed shop html to see how items were placed on the page. I wanted to try what that per­son pulled on me. I made an account, and placed a few fake items in a shop, and adver­tised in the chat room. It worked, I got a load of accounts. About a mil­lion Neo­points in under twenty minutes.

I also got a good laugh when­ever the per­son I scammed mes­saged their stolen account. All of them were furi­ous, rant­ing and threat­en­ing me. I never returned their accounts.

I admit though, there was one per­son who mes­saged me, and asked quite nicely to return their account. I gave their account back, items untouched.

Q. Do you think about how upset the peo­ple you scam are?
Oh, that’s what I find so amus­ing. They worked on this lit­tle game for so long, spend­ing their life on num­bers and data when they could be doing some­thing more fulfilling.

I can’t say I was any bet­ter when I did play Neopets, but I wasn’t mad when I lost my account, I just felt really stupid.

If peo­ple adore their accounts so much, they should pay atten­tion a lit­tle more. If it’s too good to be true, it prob­a­bly is.

Q. What meth­ods have you suc­cess­fully used in the past?
I’ve stuck to one. The typ­i­cal Shop Scam. The ones where peo­ple ask for your account and pass­word are a bit too obvi­ous and not some­thing I would do.

The shop scam seems to work. Peo­ple see a rare item for a low price and they stop think­ing and start click­ing. If a login page comes up, they enter their infor­ma­tion, not both­er­ing to look up at the address bar and see that it’s not neopets.com. And what baf­fles me is, I don’t steal their accounts right off. I wait about an hour or so, then login. And to my sur­prise, rarely any of them have changed their password.

Q. Approx­i­mately how many peo­ple have you scammed?
About Five Hundred.

Q. Is scam­ming all its cracked up to be? IE is it dif­fi­cult for you to scam? How much do you make per scam? How much have you scammed in total?
It’s not dif­fi­cult at all. It takes me about twenty min­utes to scam, and maybe another thirty to go through the accounts.

I usu­ally get about five hun­dred thou­sand Neo­points and a few rare items. I usu­ally just wind up donat­ing every­thing. If it’s not worth tak­ing, might as well give what’s in the account to peo­ple who want it. Oh, prob­a­bly around ten mil­lion Neopints, and a cou­ple mil­lion in items.

Q. If a per­son was to become a scam­mer, what advice would you give them?
Don’t bother with the ‘I have a pro­gram, send it to such and such address and include you account and pass­word.’ Doesn’t that just sound sketchy?

Try a shop scam, and put decent, but not super-rare items in it. Cheap Code­stones, Faeries, and Lab­o­ra­tory Maps usu­ally attract peo­ple. But items that are worth over a mil­lion going for pen­nies is a bit suspicious.

Don’t scam more than once a week. The Neopets staff is quite scary, they froze fifty of my accounts all at once one night.

Q. Do you not think of total ban­ning from Neopets?
I’m curi­ous how they would do that.

I have access to many com­put­ers, so if I’m banned from one, I’ll move to another.

Q. Do you like the game Neopets or just the sheer thrill of scam­ming?
I got into Neopets at first because it looked inter­est­ing. It was great when I was bored, and the idea of hav­ing a pet, and lev­el­ing it up to bat­tle other pets, was fun. I also like the ran­dom items, Mys­ti­cal Teapot of Doom, Attack Pea, Spat­ula Wand, it’s quite creative.

I def­i­nitely enjoy play­ing Neopets. I took a break from scam­ming when I man­aged to steal an account with a fairly strong pet. I bought a few pow­er­ful weapons and fought in the Meridel and Dari­gan war. I man­aged to get a decent score, and I was quite con­tent. I was in con­tact with the per­son that I stole the account from. She didn’t think I was a scam­mer, she just wanted her super-pet back. I agreed to give it back to her after the war.

That account was frozen before I could give her the pet back, though. And I don’t think it was because I had scammed. (Usu­ally when they freaze an account, they freaze any accounts I had logged on in the past week). All my other accounts were fine. So right now I’m try­ing to get that account back, I doubt it will hap­pen, though.

Q. Is your scam suc­cess ratio higher than scam fail­ure ratio?
I’ve lost every­thing I’ve stolen. Neopets is has done well when it came to freez­ing my accounts. I do have an active account though, noth­ing much on it. But I’m being cau­tious now, try­ing new things to see if I can get around being frozen.

Q. Has scam­ming taken you into more under-belly research such as hack­ing?
I researched hack­ing for about a day, but it wasn’t some­thing I had the patience to do. Besides, what’s there to hack?

Q. Would you ever con­sider becom­ing ‘clean’?
Oh def­i­nitely. I’m plead­ing with Neopets again to return my first account. If they ever do, I’ll stop.

Q. Have you ever befriended a per­son and then scam him/her? If so, why did you do it?
No, but I have befriended peo­ple after I scammed them. One wanted her pet back, and I agreed. But that account was frozen before I could return it.

Q. Over time, has scam­ming become more dif­fi­cult for you due to more wide­spread knowl­edge about this?
Yes. Oh my yes. I’ve had to redo my Fake Login and Shop Scam sev­eral times since the html for the site changes from time to time. And I don’t trick as many peo­ple as I use to, and I pretty much stopped get­ting accounts that had a lot of Neo­points and decent items in them.

Q. You men­tioned that most of the scam­mers PPT fea­tured could not spell. Do you think that these scam­mers are ama­teurs and dis­grace the name of scam­ming? Are the major­ity of scam­mers like this?
I’ve only found one scam­mer that did the job well. That scam­mer was the per­son who I fell for. He/she had a nice, well made shop scam. All the other scams I’ve seen are poorly done. Fake items in the store, but never both­ered to get rid of the ‘there are no items for sale in this shop’ at the bot­tom of the screen. Oth­ers had pop-up ads, and some neo­mail you pre­tend­ing to be staff. They’re not very convincing.

Most scam­mers I’ve seen don’t put some effort into what­ever they’re doing and make it look believable.

Dis­grace to scam­ming? Scam­ming is a dis­grace in itself, but if you decide to do it, at least do it well.

Q. Doesn’t hav­ing your account frozen after scam­ming deter you from more scam­ming?
Nah, I learn from my mis­takes. I must admit, when­ever an account I liked gets frozen, I tend to let out a heavy sigh, lower my head, and try again.

On a side note, you wouldn’t believe what I see when I check my e-mail for accounts and pass­words. Some peo­ple have hor­ri­bly obvi­ous pass­words. Also, there are those who know it’s a scam and fill up my e– mail with lots of four let­ter words.

Well, thanks for your time. I’ve enjoyed fill­ing this out. You have a great site, and it just gets bet­ter and bet­ter.