This is a story about Adobe Photoshop, a scammer with remorse and asparagus.
First, let me introduce myself: for obvious reasons I will not post my real username here, but among newbies (both the unknowing-but-willing-to-learn and the Ill-do-anything-if-you-give-me-something-shiny kind) Im known as Double Agent no0b, the Hacker with a Heart, the Undercover Scammer, or 007-Neowell, you get the idea. (To be honest, no one calls me that. Most of my victims tend to call meehma certain four-letter word which I shall not post here. Still, I prefer to be called the Undercover Scammer because A: it sounds cool and B: you KNOW it sounds cool).
I was scammer, and to be honest, a very successful one. I tricked hundreds of newbies out of their passwords, using almost every single trick in the book. Np triplets (just fill in this form and, fake log-in pages (yes, even without the picture of your active neopet, people still fell for it!), a neositting service and a few times, even pretending to be neostaff! It was just TOO easy. There was only one problem: my conscience
You see, every time I tricked someone into giving me their password and the login page had loaded, an angelic Christmas version and a devilish Darigan version of my pet Zafara, appeared on my shoulders:
Cz: dont do it! Dont do it! Its *gasp* WRONG!!!
Dz: heh, youre just afraid those cute little wings of yours will get frozen by the Neopets team
Cz: welluhm*blush* if that happens, maybe you can get over here and
Me: hey lovelennys, dating on Neopets is, like, TOTALLY illegal! By the way, arent you supposed to either convince me to do the right thing here or lure me into the clutches of evil?
Dz: dude, no one cares about your stupid inner conflict!
*turns to cz*
Dz: hey babe, how about a romantic weekend in Cockroach Towers?
Cz: *giggles*
Me: What do you mean byACK!!! Where are you going?! GET BACK HERE!!!
Anyway, my inner-taxbeast decided to ignore both Zafaras and squeeze the account for every single np it got. For some reason, I changed back the password and did not touch the items. I have no idea why, but after all those months, I suddenly felt a bit guilty.
Later on, this remorseful girl caught herself not only leaving the items behind, but also taking less and less np of her victims. My last scam was two weeks ago when I hit the jackpot. I stole a 4 year (!) old account but got a neomail from the previous owner. No begging, no threats (GIVEITBACKMYMUMKNOWSJHUDORA!!!) and no four-letter words. He just felt incredibly stupid, congratulated me with my success and asked me to take better care of my Robot Pheopin than he had done.
It was then, when my inner-taxbeast finally started dying (remember, there is no such silly thing as death in happy, happy, happy Neopia!) and Double Agent No0b was born.
For one last time I went back to my main account, transferred my Robot Zafara to the guy I cheated earlier and changed his pass back. After that, I donated all my loot to the money tree and reported myself. My account was frozen within minutes.
I created a new account and adopted a red Skeith from the pound. My SDB is empty, the soup faerie is my best friend, and I cant even afford a Spyder to visit the Symol hole, but its legal and much more fun.
Now, about those asparagus: as Double Agent No0b, I tried to scam people my posting this on several MSN boards:
1: Go to the Neopets site and log in on the account you want to use to get the NP and the Paint Brushes.
2. Play one game of Whack-A-Staff-Member and send your score. This is very important!!! If your score doesnt send because the site is down (or something like that), try again later. This cheat will only work if you have successfully submitted your score. You can still send your score if you have already played three times. You just wont get NP from your game (but it has always been like that, even without the cheat)
3. When you are done, go to search Neopets on the left of the screen? Go there, and type asparagus (without the ). If you have done everything right, you should see a picture of Adam (one of the creators of Neopets, he LOVES asparagus!) and he says You can’t have it, it’s all MINE! (nice try, mister I-have-five-Neopets-and-you-can-only-have-four Did you knew he actually has FIVE Neopets? Its true!!! His username is Borovan without the , go to his look-up and see for yourself)
4. Below the angry Adam, you see the normal search results. Buy one of the asparagus items. It doesnt matter which one, but the cheapest is Asparagus Yoghurt.
5. Feed it to one of your pets. If all of your pets refuse to eat it (its a gross food), buy something else with the name asparagus in it.
6. On your sidebar, click on Help > User Prefs (the pink Bruce) > change e-mail preferences. Change your current e-mail address into: myemailadress@blablabla.com
Once you have gotten the NP and the paint Brushes, you can change it back if you want to.
7. Go do something fun, like play a few more games of Whack-A-Staff-Member (come on, you know you want to) or just turn off your computer and read a book. It will take 12 to 24 hours for the cheat to work.
I have had some questions of what you exactly get with this cheat. To be honest, that is different each time. You always get NP and a few Paint Brushes, but the amount of NP and the kind of PBs you get appears to be completely random. Attached to this e-mail is a screenshot of my inventory, just after I used the cheat. I got 5 million NP and ten Paint Brushes, but a friend of mine only got 3 million NP and seven Paint Brushes (still not bad, if you ask me), while another friend got six million NP and TWENTY Paint brushes.
As I expected, a lot of people fell for it. I could not use the password retrieval system because the owner of the account had to confirm the change. I managed to trick him/her into this by sending the confirmation link to them, telling I forgot to e-mail the final step. All they had to do was click on the link
To make it look more real, I edited a screenshot of my inventory with Adobe Photoshop to make it look like I had 10 Paint Brushes and 5 million np. I included the screenshot with my story for the world to see. When someone clicked in it, I retrieved their password and mailed it back to them, telling how I had done it and included a link to the scammed section of PPT.
It turned out that this was NOT a good idea. Three people listened to my warning. The other 54 stole my cheat and the VERY realistic screenshot to scam others for real.
My secret weapon against scammers blew up in my face. The Asparagus Cheat spreading rapidly, more and more newbies are losing their accounts as we speak and theres nothing I can do to stop them. Thats why I send this to PPT, to warn everyone about my fatal mistake.
Please forgive me,
Double Agent No0b