Virtual mail fraud
We’ve all heard of people paying real cash for virtual goods and we’ve all heard of gaming sweatshops delivering these virtual goods, but this is far more harmless and amusing:
There’s a mail-service in world of warcraft which works like the following: there are public mailboxes in towns and anyone can pick up his mail at these mailboxes and send mail to other players. Mails are pretty much like emails, they have a recipient, subject, message body and you can attach items to them. This is especially convenient for moving stuff around the world really fast (helping a guild-mate out and such) or to send someone an item who isn’t online. It’s also possible to send collect-on-delivery mails – before the recipient can get his hands on the attached item he has to pay a certain amount of money as specified by the sender. This is especially useful for doing business – you find a buyer on the public trading channels, but they’d rather have stuff sent to one of their other characters who isn’t online so you send it collect-on-delivery.
One nice, playful touch in wow is in-game gift wrapping paper. You buy wrapping paper in one of several colors at a vendor and wrap an item up as a nice surprise – the actual contents of the package are concealed until it’s opened.
So recently some guy gave a guild-mate and me a package with a fishing rod inside as a present for no particular reason. When asked for the reason he told us that he had bought 20 fishing rods (a not particularly expensive item), wrapped them up in gift wrapping paper and sent them to high-level characters with a cash on delivery-price of one gold-piece each (a rather hefty sum, at least for a fishing rod). In order to to open the packages they had to pay the price beforehand. Out of those 20 deliveries, only three were returned to the sender and we had just received two of these three. Virtual mail fraud – that thing had me laughing for several minutes.
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