How scammers plunder your Tales of Pirates booty

by James Egan Jul 4th 2009 at 12:00PM

Filed under: Fantasy, MMO industry, Tales of Pirates, Free-to-play, Kids

For the first time in a long while, we've come across a tale of digital wrong-doing that doesn't involve internet spaceships and is definitely not allowed by the developers. The game in question is Tales of Pirates published by IGG. Apparently a number of the game's players have fallen victim to a trick, and IGG wants to publicize this to make people aware of the scam. There's a brief warning on the official Tales of Pirates site about account security, but they just put out a press release that's far more detailed.

IGG writes: "As with any popular game, IGG's Tales of Pirates has attracted its share of scammers. Even the most careful pirate can sometimes be fooled by a well-executed scam. The best way to avoid becoming a victim is to learn the common tricks scammers use. To help players, the ToP would like to highlight one particularly popular method used recently." We can only hope they emailed the full info to their playerbase, but we'll keep our own take on it short and sweet here -- five steps to violating the Tales of Pirates EULA and getting banned (and of course, what to watch out for.):

Step 1: Be a scumbag. This is vital.

Step 2: Identify the top guilds and its most famous players. Then doppelgäng them, copying their avatars and names as closely as possible.

Step 3: Identify players with rare or valuable gear. Evil laugh. Twirl mustache.

Step 4: Continue with Step 2, impersonate those well-known players and invite your targets to sign up with your über guild via a fake IGG or Tales of Pirates site. This is where phishing enthusiasts will excel, also refer back to Step 1.

Step 5. Using the account names and passwords you've now harvested, pillage their Tales of Pirates accounts. Yarr! Rinse and repeat. Congrats, you're a tool and a thief of virtual things. eBay is your friend.

All mockery aside, hopefully IGG has been proactive in warning its playerbase about the scam, and those gamers will be less likely to get ripped off in the future.

Tags: f2p, fantasy, free-to-play, igg, impersonation, kids, mmo-industry, phishing, scam, scams, tales-of-pirates