Scammer posing as RoM GM :thinking:

Started by Yoojin, Jan 28, 2017, 04:04 PM

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Yoojin

Slightly resolved & hella traumatized.

http://imgur.com/a/7yoPy

Fluorite~

This is the strangest advertisement for the OP's link I've seen.

I love the "self explanatory" screenshots and how they're easily fabricated.

I love how none of the stuff you describe is nowhere in the server's public GM logs.  Oops! https://riseofmidgard.com/gmlogs

misterj

you should have gotten a friend who knew english to fake their lines for you instead, but the effort is amusing

Aselaa

#3
That was not Zinnia. Staff on RoM do NOT try to recruit you in-game through a chatroom, request you to teamviewer send credit card info... You got phished by a bad player. I promise you. We have in-game announcement specifically warning about this type of behavior.

That is not even Zinnia's Skype account. No staff member has a special Skype account just for RoM because we do not intend to EVER contact players that way. We use Discord for our communication as you can verify it is actually us by checking the RoM discord!


If you submit a support ticket, I will personally take care of fixing this for you... but I highly suggest you take personal precautions if you showed this fake-Zinnia your credit cards.

I have personally checked your account for why it was banned.


First: Your characters levels are different because you gave this scammer your birthdate... which is the key for deleting a character.
Second: They created new characters on your account to continue attempting to scam other players. http://puu.sh/tEnq2/5602498309.png This is our logs. These are the actions taken on your account.
Third: I'm really sorry this happened to you, and will 100% attempt to correct this.

- Asela
Edit: And for those not aware: Asela = Ash! Hello!

ElariaRO

Yoojin! I'm really sorry to see that you was a victim of this ongoing ingame scam.
I have Zinnia's skype and I can assure that this is not him. RoM only uses discord, forum and ingame to communicate with the playerbase.
It sadly happened on my last two servers various times and people fall for it over and over again.

I'm sure Ash and Zinnia will help you to get your account back!

Humpy

gm vry injustic you are make of the anal baguette to us or REPROT MUCH OF THE SERVER

DeePee

These scammers are server hopping every few days.  Every major server has been a target by now. The methods of trying to get you to send money is exactly the same the use on every other server out there. Nothing new really.

yC

Please leave individual support request to the server's respective forum or support system (that means I have just deleted that whole conversation where a player is asking a gm for support and the gm answers ...)

In this case, RMS is concerned if the "GM" involved is an actual staff of the server (so more action can be taken).  I dig up an old topic to show the OP that it happened before and she could be a victim of a similar case again.

It seems these type of scam is more common than I expect, is there any better way to educate the players on this?

Boreas

Quote from: yC on Jan 28, 2017, 09:18 PM
It seems these type of scam is more common than I expect, is there any better way to educate the players on this?

We tried, but people still fall for this trick. I had someone flame me in a support ticket because he thought that I asked him for $200 on Skype in order to become a GM.... I even contacted Skype and asked them to block the account, but they didn't react to it. All you can do is warn your players and spread the word.

P.S.: Why would you pay $200 in order to become a GM, I don't get it.

Tokeiburu

Yep, correct. All servers have been concerned with this issue. There are few things you can do to prevent this, though. Their main method of contact is by using the good old line break in chatrooms and then use your GM name (for example: "Scammer : Hey, how are you doing?               [Admin] Asela : Add me on skype at..."). What you can do:
- Block specific strings in chatrooms, such as:
  - All of your GM names
  - All of your GM tags, such as '[Admin]'
  - Block the words 'skype' and 'teamviewer'
  - Block the ' : ' string
  - Block the word GM, GameMaster, Game Master, etc
  - Add a minimum level requirement to create or enter chatrooms (though that one may be annoying)
- Block triple spaces in any chat, and ensure you also block any other other type of spaces (they will tend to use special space characters).
- If you're using rAthena, add chatlogs for chatrooms and monitor these frequently when you notice a new player is getting scammed (practically nobody uses chatrooms for convos).

That alone is usually enough to make most players not fall for these tricks.

lnvu

the skype name would tell u that Zinnia wouldnt place "GM" on his name even in skype but it is common knowledge that zinnia teamviews players to fix their "problems"


Terpsichore

I have dealt with the same issue as well and it seems to be recurring. I believe it's the same person, looking at the tactics and manner of speech.

I don't get how can people fall for this, considering they write nothing like the person they're trying to impersonate and sending a few hundred dollars to the Philippines through Western Union doesn't strike me as a good idea. That besides, I would feel personally insulted if a player fell for this and thought that we would go as low as selling a "GM position".

Zinnia

#12
Quote from: Yoojin on Jan 28, 2017, 04:04 PM
Slightly resolved & hella traumatized.

http://imgur.com/a/7yoPy

I would have prefered you to keep the full entirety of your topic and not just leave a link to that imgur s***, as it may lead certain people to not understand the full situation, and ultimately believe that I am the lying piece of s*** who blackmailed you. You're actually making it worse.
As a matter of fact, and despite us trying to help you, it makes me think that you aren't entirely convinced you fell for an ingame chatbox scam and the person you discussed with wasn't me. Therefore please let me wake up from my bed and recap everything that happened.


Somebody ingame put up a chatroom that you joined, impersonated me with linebreaks in this chatroom, and suggested you to become a GM in our Staff.

Firstly, on Rise of Midgard you will never be invited to join the Staff via ingame chatrooms.
We even have an ingame announcement that tells you so:



Secondly, we only recruit GMs after they read a forum topic. Our GM recruitment process starts here: https://riseofmidgard.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=76&p=2079#p2079



And if your candidature is interesting, the first person you will talk to is Daifuku, 'cause she is the one filtering the applications before they reach me.
Therefore, if you have been contacted by a "Zinnia", to recruit you as a GM before you talked to Daifuku, that couldn't have been me.

You can contact all the new Staff members if you wish to know how the process is like. Mila, Valky, Franky, Celestial. You can also ask them if they have been asked to pay money to become a GM... None of them did. And none of our GMs is being paid neither. We reward GM work with Cash Points.

Thirdly, that is how my Skype address looks like:



We are far from the "Zinnia GM" address you talked to.

Fourthly, this all happened on Thursday between 9 and 11am your time, right?
in CET time it is between 15:00 and 17:00. Which is exactly the time where I am at work. I can show you my work contract if you really want to, but I would have been entirely unable to log ingame and have this discussion with you on Thursday while I was at work.

Lastly , you have me on discord Yoojin.. We both briefly discussed on discord already and we are on the same Discord. Why didn't you just send a message to me on Discord to quickly check that this was really me?




Additional notes:

Quote from: lnvu on Jan 29, 2017, 01:00 AM
the skype name would tell u that Zinnia wouldnt place "GM" on his name even in skype but it is common knowledge that zinnia teamviews players to fix their "problems"



Yes. I do teamviewer with players who encounter technicalities and cannot run their client / access the game. I don't see anything wrong with that?
LinkZ and Perry also do so. However you can ask all of the players we helped through teamviewer, we were NEVER looking for their personal information. As a matter of fact we always asked them to put their client folder on their desktop so we wouldn't have to dig in their files.

The name of my laptop is DESKTOP-JUROMR1. That's the name that's supposed to show up at the bottom right when I Teamviewer with somebody. I am 300% certain this is not the name Yoojin saw when she accepted the Teamviewer connection.

Quote from: Terpsichore on Jan 29, 2017, 01:08 AM
I have dealt with the same issue as well and it seems to be recurring. I believe it's the same person, looking at the tactics and manner of speech.

I don't get how can people fall for this, considering they write nothing like the person they're trying to impersonate and sending a few hundred dollars to the Philippines through Western Union doesn't strike me as a good idea. That besides, I would feel personally insulted if a player fell for this and thought that we would go as low as selling a "GM position".

I feel personally insulted and even more that she is still having suspicions that both Asela and I tried to blackmail her even though we are trying to help her now.
Not to mention everyone is telling her that this chatroom trick is old like the world, or the English of the person she talked to on Skype is... definitely worse than mine. (Mine's far from being perfect but c'mon...)


Now:

- Your account and characters have been given back to you. If there is anything missing please feel free to reach out to us.
- Both the IP and MAC addresses of the person who logged on your account are spoofed. There is consequently noway for us to track who that is. I gave you the spoofed IPs in PM.
However, we are working on a new unique hardware ID on RoM for security reasons. If this person strikes again in the future and is a RoM player, we might be able to identify them.
- The weirdest part of your story is that your account got jailed and banned by Auraxinji a few moments after the fact. I am yet to understand in what circumstances this happened but I swear to you we will go through every log we can to find out what happened. I would also really appreciate if you could share with me more information, like did that person talked to you about anything critical that only Staff members could have known? I highly doubt it was the case but it's still worth investigating.
- If the scammer bought anything online with your credit card/paypal, call your bank and tell them you've been the victim of a Scam.
- If I see your phone number or your personal pictures on our website/forum, they will be immediately deleted.
Vlin, Franky and Bormanic are our monderators and have been especially recruited just for that. You don't have to worry about your information being shared on our domain. As for the loading screens allegations, well, big lol. The only person capable of changing that is Asela/Ash.

If there's anything else I can do for you please please please feel free to whisp me on Discord.
I understand this is a traumatizing experience for you and you may be disgusted that it happened on RoM, but trust me, all of the RO servers have been targeted by the exact same thing. Asela, Perry and I are all here to help you so please let us do so.

And please delete those images on imgur. I don't want anyone to believe we are actual frauds when we are not.

@yC: We had that problem on DoM too last year. It seems to be some gang that targets all of the RO servers with enough players.

Zinnia

Thank you for changing the thread headline.

yC

I think this problem is worth patching it from the source, did someone try to submit something to create a fix from rAthena and Hercules so new or updated servers will not have this problem?

Zinnia

Quote from: yC on Jan 29, 2017, 09:38 AM
I think this problem is worth patching it from the source, did someone try to submit something to create a fix from rAthena and Hercules so new or updated servers will not have this problem?

We will look into solutions to filter that kind of behavior &/or block it and if we have one we will share it on rAthena forums and send the link in this topic.

Notturno

This is exactly why I play on Rise of Midgard, great to see a quick and fair resolution.  /no1

Inochi

80% chance that was Zinnia's brother from another mother located and hosted inside the #5 internet cafe of the Philippines.
<3

RyukaValis

#18
This is a common scam method used on most RO private servers. This happened to me frequently on a server I played on around September 2016 where I would put up a chatroom trying to recruit guildmembers. Random players would disguise themselves as Game Masters and Admins of said server, asking to get my Skype and telling me to "keep quiet about it". Then two months later on another server the exact same scenario happened again. I sincerely doubt ROM staffers would try to attempt such a thing.

What you can do about it is just to report them to your respective server GMs through forums or in-game methods. The more players that does just that the less fishy chatroom schemes will occur. Naturally, you can't stop people from trying to scam but you can prevent some individuals from fraud.

There is also a very easy way to see deception. Look at their names and compare them to the actual developers. If in doubt look around a bit or ask someone.