Learn From a Scammer by Anonymous

So you want to make quick neopoints? Like ultra quick neopoints? Enough to buy you a rare paintbrush within a short amount of time? Or perhaps you want to get all the pieces to the lab map? Well, how about learning from a scammer? Sure, that sounds good, but I think I shall give you a little warning first. Scamming can and will 99% of the time get your account frozen. I lost an account that had almost 10 million in it because of scamming. And I am in no way encouraging you to scam people, I am simply here to tell you the life of Neopets from a scammer’s point of view.

Sure, some people scam because they are low on neopoints; because they want something so bad and don’t have the patience to wait for it. I however, was not one of those people. I found ways (actually perfectly reasonable and quick ways that were not against the TOS) to make over 100k in a day. Yes, that is right, 100k a day non freezable. I will get to that story later though. I wanted the thrill of scamming; I wanted to be able to laugh at Neopets when they said their account was non-hackable… I wanted to be a truly remembered scammer (which was soon to be forgotten and covered up by TNT).

Let’s start from the beginning. In the early days of Neopets, when they were still small and nearly no one has heard of them, when there was only around 6 pets available to choose from. I started my first Neopets account their second year open. Yes, that was quite a long time ago. My very first person I scammed, My ex-best friend. We had gotten into a fight earlier that day and I wanted revenge. Being a middle school child at that time I had no idea what to do to her that would make her angry at me… but then it hit me; we were both already obsessed with Neopets. We knew each other’s passwords, we were like sisters and played the games on each others accounts that we weren’t really good at. (Most of the games back then were so basic, only PHP and html games… they were just starting to produce mediocre flash games).

I decided to take her account. Yes, easy since I knew her password, but it was still a scam. That is where my scamming days started. It was a thrill, a thrill to see someone annoyed and frustrated (and not even know I was the one that took her account). Too bad though, I may have actually given it back in the name of France if she told me to.

My second scam. I started talking on the very VERY old Neoboards (they were so much different years ago… so small). We started talking for a few days before he told me that he was going to go on summer vacation and he wanted someone to watch over his Neopets and not let them die. (People are really stupid, your Neopets cannot now, or have ever been able to just DIE). *Kaching* This kid was looking for someone to watch his account for him, and possibly earn them some neopoints in the process. I was like, what the heck, I’m bored, I’ll watch your pathetic pets for you. When I got into his account, I realized that this boy was a RICH kid. He had Paintbrushes and faeries galore. Ah, the scamming urge hit me again. Within a few minutes his account was drained. I stupidly left his account up and active. He came back and reported me after finding all of his stuff gone. Oops, that was a mistake. Account number one frozen.

Of course I was a bit upset, I was still a scammer in the practice… I had tasted blood and I wanted more. So what did I do? Make another account of course. I decided that I wanted revenge (Yes.. I wanted revenge because my account was frozen for something I did…. How lame isn’t it?) I scammed a few more people the same way that I did to this boy… Neositting. It didn’t take long before this trick became a fad, and this fad a trend. It is sad though, neositting once was a very… VERY honorable trend back in the early days of Neopets… People USED to be honest… Of course it didn’t last long when scammers saw the opportunity.

Neolodges were implemented not long after this fad became a trend… I never attempted to Neosit again. It was a well known scam. So what would I do next? Contests… Yes… Contests… Every shop and the newly founded guilds were hosting contests in hopes to make friends, sell more items and get new members to their guilds. So I hosted a few -honest- contests of my own to sell more items. I would pick a particular item, and would give that person a prize when someone bought it. (All your np gains from the shop used to be tracked, not just 1000 or more). Then I realized, hey… I see people pushing up the prices for these contests… why can’t I? So the prices got higher and higher… this, was a fad I had followed in that most Neopets players did. A lot of neopoints were earned, and at this time, contests were not against the TOS. I eventually stopped giving out prizes, which I assume most players never did. Eventually this was considered a scam and a reportable offense… At the time it wasn’t, but it was a slow np earner… So I stopped this tactic.

CGI? You’re kidding? Have you noticed that every page on Neopets ends with ..phtml? That means it is written in a language called PHP. Did you know that it hasn’t always been like this? www.Neopets.com/index.phtml used to be www.Neopets.com/index.cgi CGI… Common Gateway Interface. This is a language that is PERL based, as well as C and C++ based. It is actually a pretty dead internet language that was taken over by PHP. But that is beyond the point, you aren’t hear to learn about the history of programming languages.

CGI was a very, VERY unsecured language. So insecure that EVERY username and password was stored in a file called htaccess? Yes, that is right… EVERY username and password was stored into one… single… file… Oh the excitement. Not only did this file tell you the username and password, but it told you emails, how much neopoints this person had… It told scores of games. This file was the GOD of all files. Oh… the challenge. I wanted this file. And I mean I REALLY wanted this file. Neopets was the ‘unhackable’ site. I HAD to have this file. I had to get over the Neopets saying and hack into their site. Too bad though, they covered most of the issues about getting into the admin panel of their site. (address not given, but it has changed since then).

I decided to take a different route. I simply found a program on the internet to rip EVERY SINGLE item from the Neopets server. Too easy right? Wrong… CGI is a pretty insecure language, and Neopets was pretty insecure at the time. This program worked so, SO easily. Not only did I get that file that I wanted, but I also got a nice amount of images.

What did I do with this file? One thing.. Rubbed it into Neopets face. Like I said, I wasn’t here for the neopoints… I was there for the challenge. I opened the file to see if truly was the godly file I was looking for.. then guess what I did with it… I sent it to Iris’s (A person on Neopets that I am pretty sure doesn’t work there anymore) email with the subject line “You have been hacked… Thank you.. I am expecting to get frozen now”

I was of course, frozen within the day, and Neopets change to .phtml very quickly. “Neopets has never been, and never will be hacked.” I’m sorry, but every site, even GOOGLE has been hacked… Neopets is no different, they just don’t want to lose stock. We are only a statistic to them anyway. Neopets will never… EVER admit to anyone that they have been hacked… I can almost guarantee you it has happened at least ten dozen times. I was only in middle school and early high school when doing all of this (okay so I was a really SMART kid… don’t blame my family for all being in the computer programming field and starting my career early).

Refreshers. Oh the glory days of refreshers… Okay, this was NEVER a scam, but it was a very nice cheat. There was, and still is a way to program a nice little thing called a refresher. I started with two pages being refreshed every thirty seconds to find random items and events on the floor.. After running this for a whole day or while I was at school, I realized how well it worked. The idea hit me hard. How about fifty pages refreshing all at once? Sure, it would slow down my internet some, but we had a second phone line… Why not? I changed the settings on the refresher and I soon had fifty Neopets windows refreshing every 10 seconds…

Refreshers were banned once this trend picked up. It was, and STILL is a very easy traceable offense. It takes up Neopets bandwidth and costs them a whole lot of money. They can see what computer is where and how many pages they visit in how much time. If you go to way too many pages in so long, Neopets will automatically freeze your account now. So never.. EVER THINK about using a refresher. You got that? They were once LEGAL to use in Neopets world… then against the TOS and now presently AUTOMATIC FREEZABLE. Thank you.. point taken clear I hope.

Right around the same time refreshers were out, a new program came to live. I will not give the name of this program as I am almost positive it still exists. It WILL automatically freeze your account now so I do NOT suggest even attempting to look for it and use it. Say Thank you Ms Scammer for telling me the obvious that will get my account frozen. Anyway, this program would automatically play games for you…. particularly Kacheek seek. What it would do would pick one of the basic -hard- puzzles and just start running the links in a closed ie window quickly until your pet was bored with the game. It would basically earn you all the np you could from that game in about two or three minutes. Yes, it was for the truly impatient. I was able to use this program for a good year before Neopets started banning people that used it. And again, account frozen.. Number three down, fourth to come up.

I made my new account almost directly after this account was frozen. I wasn’t TOO overly upset… I had been frozen before, and I had figured that I would get my last frozen from the program. I just felt like being a jerk to see how long it would take me to get this own frozen. Not really a scam, but this is what a scammer did in her free time when she was bored. It was about the time when mystery island came out, they had a survivor thing for the island to see which staff member would be voted the winner. Upon this time, I wanted the ultimate lord “Mr. Roboto” to win the contest… I also wanted them to make him into a plushy AND a petpet. Go figure… I had a Mr. Roboto fetish. And of course staff members had a Neopets staff page at this time. Instead of emailing Mr. Roboto himself, I picked Iris… yes, some programmer named Iris… I don’t believe he works at Neopets anymore though, his Neopets email isn’t active anymore. I emailed this dude at least 20 times a day demanding that he make Mr. Roboto into a plushy. Sure, all in good fun… but when he started getting mean to me after about a week in his replies to myself, I started threatening to bring an uprising of scams and hacks to Neopets… oh good lord…. This account was frozen upon mentioning that. Time to find some new scams.

Account 5- Theme parks. It was quickly made note to all Neopians everywhere that there were programs out there to play games for you and EARN the neopoints for you so you didn’t have to do them. (Think how stupid that sounds… there is programs that will play the games for you on a GAME website… why are you there if you don’t play the games? Honestly.. some people are idiots) Myself, and a few of my more devious Neopets friends came up with an idea. Hey, we know the name to these games and where they are located? Why not SELL the location to them? Sure… okay, cool. So we would BUILD theme parks with minimum rides in them and type the address for these games into the park… We would THEN put the park price up to about 10k an entry. And what do you know, within the day we had over a million neopoints in each of our accounts. Was our accounts frozen? not at all, this was not against the TOS at the time. No reason to freeze us, we were ONLY giving information out… It was not us that paid the entrance fee, and it was not us that used the programs. We just thought we had really cool parks and they deserved huge fees to ride and enter.

This is the exact reason why outside link addresses and theme parks no longer exist. Sorry to everyone who complains, it was not only my work, but about 10 thousand other people did this exact same thing. The theme parks weren’t that cool anyway, I’m sure you can find the flash videos for them hidden somewhere anyway on a dead part of their site.

Ah the joys of PHP. Did you know that shops could once upon a time run more than just basic html and CSS? Yes, they could run minor PHP scripts as well as JavaScripts. The PHP scripts was an error because TNT didn’t block those certain tags, and JavaScript because it wasn’t causing problems yet. However, this was a major mistake in TNT’s judgment.

JavaScript being allowed in Neopets caused a few major issues (none of which I actually partook in). They would instantly refresh you to a new page, make you download a virus secretly on the backside of your computer, and even steal cookies from your browser to gain your user id and password. JavaScript was quickly taken out of use for any of the Neopets users. PHP however, the language Neopets is about 80 percent written in, was still overlooked.

There was, once upon a time, to in fact give people neopoints. If put into your shop, anything a person would buy would actually NOT leave your shop, and would also be added into their inventory. As well as the neopoints into your account. So imagine… codestones… cheap as can be… This code put into your shop… they keep buying the codestones, you keep getting money, you both end up with codestones. This was a nice little trick that increased your np quickly, and was a well effort made item duplicator. Yes, you have all heard of the legendary item duplicators, but barely anyone has seen them. You know why? Each item duplicator was fixed, and the users frozen within a week of it’s findings.

My last, and final scamming and cheating, which was far less original than all the others, a fake Neopets log in. These sites were WONDERFUL… And geeze, people fell for them WAY too often. I don’t have much to say here.. I am not going to go into detail as these are way too easy to make, and not a whole lot are reported because new users are tricked by this too often.

Yes, scamming on Neopets. I get so frustrated when I see the unoriginal scams on the Neopets sites. They give people like ME a bad name (not like I wasn’t giving myself a bad one either). I had however, with the help of a few of my geeky friends, created a revolution of scams. I had also done this, WITHOUT using poor english. Never once have I sent a neomail to someone that looked similar to this

“gve me ur pswrdill give u FREE np if u do”

That… in itself just sickens me. It makes me look back on my past and see how much Neopets has improved in security, and how stupid people have become. My scamming legacy was put to shame when users that wrote things such as this took over.

In no way am I encouraging you to scam ANYONE… In fact, I have only told you of maybe half of the things that went on… some of the more creative things at least. Most of the things I have told you about will in fact get you frozen automatically or within the night. I refuse to tell anyone anything else. Scamming is against the Neopets TOS, and hacking into sites IS an illegal action that can be taken into offense if the site sees so fit.

I myself, have had enough of scamming in the past. The child in me grew up. I graduated high school, I went off to college… I even program a game site of my own now. I even rejoined Neopets a few months ago and actually started playing once again. And playing fair.

If you came to this article to learn to make np quick by scamming, or to learn to even scam… I’m sorry, but you have asked the wrong person. I have came here to inform you, and give you a nice little story about past Neopets scams in a little more entertaining way than you usually hear about.

If you want to make quick np, I suggest you to go look for the 10k a day guides… After you have mastered about 4 or 5 of them (yes they each have different ways to make 10k a day) You can probably make 20-30k a day with those. Learn about restocking and sniping. I snipe two or three nights a week, and I will usually end up making anywhere from 50k-150k a night. My best record was 300k in one night to finish up getting the laboratory map that I wanted oh so much to zap my poor, frightened Neopets.

A hint though, if you want to be a good sniper… Neopets premium helps. Yup.. you heard it, former hacker and scammer fully supports Neopets by paying for their premium feature. I figured I have done enough damage to them in the past, and maybe helped them find some security issues. I may as well support them now.