Midgard Tales GMs scam me out of 3k

[Deimon]

So the GMs from Midgard Tales just scammed me and my sibling out of 3,100 USD in Bitcoin (BTC) lol. I feel like I'm living in a fever dream, it's so ridiculous I'm laughing.

I know, I know. Stupid of me. I don't even like BTC. I don't even use BTC until I was encouraged by the GM Saga and the creator of the server and was promptly scammed. Damn! Donate to your local GM, they're broke as hell and having to resort to scamming players, the original punching bag—I mean, moneybag. Not enough people donating? Saga's got an easy fix for you. BTC scams!!

Anyway, can't wait for her to gaslight me here if she sees it. She took every precaution to cover her footsteps, and I'm the world's biggest idiot for not seeing it. But hey, who expects to get BTC scammed from a GM? All I have are screenshots from her when we spoke on Discord. I, stupidly, did not take any when we spoke IGN. Man, lesson learned.

So, you want to know how Saga did it? Here's how.

Steps to scamming your players:
1. Create a noob creator and whisper them IGN, tell them to meet you @21
2. Create a private chat and have your victim enter. Have your husband and fellow GM there, Pegasus, to reassure the victim this is Saga (what he's really saying is this is daylight robbery)
3. Tell your victim to enter a Discord server she made for the sole purpose of scamming you, so when she's done she can delete the chat history
4. Reassure your victim, tell them you want to pick a new player as a GM because you don't trust the veteran players (the truth is they pick new players so no one will believe them when they say they've been scammed). Tell them you're desperate for GMs because you and your husband purchased a subcontract with 4games and Gravity to merge with a big server with 300-500 players to become an official iRO server. That is why you're desperate!
5. Say to me, who is Asian, that all the players who try to bribe her are Asian. None of the white players. Prefix that with, I'm not racist BUT. Why, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you were...perhaps...racist?? Btw, Saga is German.
6. Have them download Anydesk so they can take control of your computer, have you buy Bitcoin, make you a paper wallet and transfer said Bitcoin into the paper wallet, and screencap your private key
7. Use said private key to rob 'em blind! (For those of you who don't know, I'm sorry to force you into reading about BTC, I wish I could return to the days where I didn't know what a paper wallet was. It's an offline wallet for BTC and it's not connected to any online wallet (Coinbase, Blockchain, etc.) so if you want to easily get your money out, you can't. You need to import it, blahblahblah, and your private key is the only way in. All this just to say, it gives the GMs enough time to grab your private key and rob you. I Googled all this today because I had no idea what the hell any of this was)
8. Now to hide the body. Block your players, delete the chat history, delete Anydesk from their computers (delete the session history, it shows Saga's IP address), do whatever it takes

The funny part is, none of my screenshots show the important details. So either you believe me or you don't, which I dearly hope you do because the Midgard Tales GMs are on the loose and they're coming for your money. Saga, Pegasus, are you reading this? I INVITE you to gaslight me. Come at me in the comments. You know who I am. You know what you did.

Anyway, to all my dear readers (excluding the obvious), you're welcome to call me dumb in the comments. It can't be as bad as what I've said to myself. So I quit RO. Back to reality. Back to making real $$ so Saga and company can steal it from me again. I can't wait.

https://ibb.co/MMds7ry
https://ibb.co/pfg2FJZ
https://ibb.co/RjkyxJt
https://ibb.co/4d12csB

Screenshot descriptions.
1. Saga lying to me and my sister that our money will disappear in the wallet, which is untrue. She said my sister only needed to buy 1k to activate the wallet.
2. Saga promising to send my sister 2k. Then Saga promising to send my sister 3k and not giving us an explanation. 'Delay' doesn't mean anything. Saga talking about the GM meeting. She said at 12:30 PM we would meet Pegasus and the other GM. Then she pushed it back to 1:30 AM, which we could not make because damn we need sleep. I would have made the meeting if I knew she would steal all our money lmao.
3. It's the next morning I realize Saga had been speaking to me through a separate Discord account. I know it's her, we talked IGN along with Pegasus but hey, no proof so it's whatever you want it to be. She renames her account and blocks me. See that she called me a bajillion times because she is crazy.
4. I make a new Discord and message Pegasus since I'm 100% sure Saga blocked me. He does not respond. You make a ticket or DM, GMs respond immediately. Why not to this? If you weren't guilty, you would respond to me. Hey, you know what they say. Birds of a feather flock together.

[Nova]

You're a dummy :/
I've always felt like it's impossible to be scammed if you are a thinking human. Some fillipinos (I'm assuming) online who you don't know at all, ask you to make a BTC wallet to send money to them and you actually send them money? My man, why would you go along with this? @_@

I just checked those screenshots and they even talk like scammers with that typical broken english. Were you maybe fooled by their cute anime avatars? Maybe that made you let your guard down. This is why I'm always wary of anime avatars, you never know who or what hides behind it.

In any case, I'm assuming you learned your lesson right? After this you will never get scammed again for the rest of your life. I learned this when I was 12 and I input my username and password on a site that promised to double my money on XileRO back in the day. That was my tuiton money, yours is 3.1k. So that's a positive at least.

[mynameisllaw]

What a dum dum~

- In the first place, if you'll play the game just play the game and not interact much with the GMs or so.
- Any transactions unrelated to the game are automatically a red flag.
- Gravity has been suing private servers and closing them down, why would this server be an exception and have a subcontract?
- Getting a new player or even anyone else as a GM; can be considered as a job and has a lot of responsibilities so PMing them or telling them such things easily is definitely a red flag.

Well all in all you dug your own grave, just earn experience points irl and yeah play a different game.

[Nova]

Those fellas are probably siblings or really good friends irl who run a side hustle together which in this case is a RO midrate private server. I think they have like a 100 suckers playing there with a couple donations here and there. So if they make like what 500 USD per month from that, it's pretty good if you live in the Phillipines. Add to that 3.1k split threeways that you gave them and they had a good year. I bet you could live comfortably with that money for a year depending on their rent.

[Sairek Ceareste]

Run a virus scan on your computer, OP. You very likely still have malware code running on your computer.

Alternatively do a reformat of your computer.


The same person running those scams have tried to do the same thing to people in Payon Stories, too.

[Aeroskye]

This is all on you. These types of scams are popular all around. Just play the game the way you're supposed to and not take any shortcuts.

[Nova]

Btw OP, you forgot to tell us why you gave them $3.1k in the first place.

[Shuchou]

Btw OP, you forgot to tell us why you gave them $3.1k in the first place.

Kind of did in "step 4"
4. Reassure your victim, tell them you want to pick a new player as a GM because you don't trust the veteran players (the truth is they pick new players so no one will believe them when they say they've been scammed). Tell them you're desperate for GMs because you and your husband purchased a subcontract with 4games and Gravity to merge with a big server with 300-500 players to become an official iRO server. That is why you're desperate!

[Neffletics]

Kind of did in "step 4"
4. Reassure your victim, tell them you want to pick a new player as a GM because you don't trust the veteran players (the truth is they pick new players so no one will believe them when they say they've been scammed). Tell them you're desperate for GMs because you and your husband purchased a subcontract with 4games and Gravity to merge with a big server with 300-500 players to become an official iRO server. That is why you're desperate!

To clarify for everyone, GRAVITY will never merge with any private servers. If they were to do so, it would imply that well-established servers like Talon and Nova should have been given the opportunity to merge with an official iRO pre-renewal or renewal server.

Moreover, private servers typically use an Athena-based emulator, while GRAVITY operates on AEGIS. Merging the databases of a private server and an official server would require significant effort, and starting from scratch may be a more viable option. Additionally, factors such as the in-game economy and unique customizations present in both servers must be taken into consideration.

In summary, the possibility of merging a private server with an official server is not feasible. I'm sharing this information here so that it may potentially appear in future search engine queries related to this topic.

[Nova]

Kind of did in "step 4"
4. Reassure your victim, tell them you want to pick a new player as a GM because you don't trust the veteran players (the truth is they pick new players so no one will believe them when they say they've been scammed). Tell them you're desperate for GMs because you and your husband purchased a subcontract with 4games and Gravity to merge with a big server with 300-500 players to become an official iRO server. That is why you're desperate!

Yeah I guess that's the reason, but that still leaves me with a big "why?", you know what I mean? The more I think about it, the more idiotic this situation looks to me.

[LuffySab]

hello friends

inside our own discord we had this discussion of this so called report towards our server two days ago
we did not see this thread and now we see it when admin of rms linked us

this report has so many red flags and we will poke them out with following materials that we have gathered

firstly reporter (scammed person) is in my friendlist and we had conversation not long ago, this person should be aware of my official discord existence
he created a ticket for support and here is how i contacted and assisted this person, until today we are still friendlisted

https://ibb.co/N7ph6MK
https://ibb.co/G3wtKYZ
https://ibb.co/Wk6G4CX

this malicious discord account of fake Saga were removed from discord instantly when detected by us on same day
we have habbit to see who joining our discord when ever and when saw this fake account joining us, we banned it instantly, this happened last week

https://ibb.co/S354gm4
https://ibb.co/ZKjYzQQ
https://ibb.co/px819mm
https://ibb.co/KhN7C07


finally we believe (our conclusion and guess) this scammer and scammed person are same people (could be recent banned rmt player's fake accounts) to defame our server and name

person claims to be "stupid fall for scam", yet this person created many topics both in review, and forums and even inside our own discord trying to make a scene (chat log still exists inside our discord) and it was directly targetting us as if we actually did it.
also when confronted inside our discord by community, this person went silent.

we believe nobody was scammed by any money, this is a pure tactical method to defame our server and name of Saga

thank you for reading

[Shuchou]

Yeah I guess that's the reason, but that still leaves me with a big "why?", you know what I mean? The more I think about it, the more idiotic this situation looks to me.

Not sure, but my guess would be people get excited and act before thinking about what is going on. Like how in Eve online people see others spamming in local chat "Send me isk and I'll send double back" they send said scammer 1mil and get 2mil back. So they get excited and send 100mil to get nothing back when the scam-ie thought they would get 200mil. People get a high thinking they could be a GM on a game they play and forget that means taking away from their time they could be playing the game and likely getting paid nothing for doing said GM tasks.

hello friends

inside our own discord we had this discussion of this so called report towards our server two days ago
we did not see this thread and now we see it when admin of rms linked us

this report has so many red flags and we will poke them out with following materials that we have gathered

firstly reporter (scammed person) is in my friendlist and we had conversation not long ago, this person should be aware of my official discord existence
he created a ticket for support and here is how i contacted and assisted this person, until today we are still friendlisted

https://ibb.co/N7ph6MK
https://ibb.co/G3wtKYZ
https://ibb.co/Wk6G4CX

this malicious discord account of fake Saga were removed from discord instantly when detected by us on same day
we have habbit to see who joining our discord when ever and when saw this fake account joining us, we banned it instantly, this happened last week

https://ibb.co/S354gm4
https://ibb.co/ZKjYzQQ
https://ibb.co/px819mm
https://ibb.co/KhN7C07


finally we believe (our conclusion and guess) this scammer and scammed person are same people (could be recent banned rmt player's fake accounts) to defame our server and name

person claims to be "stupid fall for scam", yet this person created many topics both in review, and forums and even inside our own discord trying to make a scene (chat log still exists inside our discord) and it was directly targetting us as if we actually did it.
also when confronted inside our discord by community, this person went silent.

we believe nobody was scammed by any money, this is a pure tactical method to defame our server and name of Saga

thank you for reading

Just because the actively used discord account of said admin/staff member was not use doesn't mean it could not have been said person on an alt. Same goes to say that it could have been anyone pretending to be the staff member hoping to find someone foolish enough to fall for it. Sadly only the parties involved will truly know, as for OP you can report the account(s) that took part and discord will look to see if there are any other accounts linked to them and address the issue from there.

[Tokeiburu]

Create a private chat and have your victim enter.

That's a scam as old as RO existed. It's quite impressive people still fall for it though.

But that alone is enough for me to indicate Midgard Tales GMs are unrelated to this and you got scammed by a third party. A real GM doesn't need to bother with a stupid chatroom to begin with, he'd just show up next to you and that will be 10 times more convincing than wasting his time with this crap. The chatroom messages are the key element of this scam and unfortunately you didn't take any screenshot of it. The way the scam works is they ask you to join the chatroom, and then they'll pretend a GM also joined by putting enough spaces (or enough text) so that the GM name appears on the next line. So something like this:

Hey I'm the noob creator, thanks for joining my scam              GM Saga : It's me the real owner, ahah, believe everything I say

After that, you feel reassured because you see a "real" GM in the chatroom with you, while in reality there's only 2 people in it: you and that noob creator.

As for the admins of the server (and all other server owners for that matter), I can only recommend you to block the following. It's the bare minimum to prevent these scams on your server.

Code Select Expand


length = strlen(output) + 1;

if (sd->chatID && pc_get_group_level(sd) < 20) {
int i;

for (i = 0; i < length; i++) {
switch(output[i]) {
case '\x09':
case '\xA0':
case '\x0A':
case '\x0B':
case '\x0C':
case '\x0D':
output[i] = '\x20';
break;
}
}

if (stristr(output, " : ") || stristr(output, " ; ") || stristr(output, "   ") ||
stristr(output, "Tokei") || stristr(output, "Saga") || stristr(output, "Pegasus") ||
stristr(output, "GM ") || stristr(output, "[G M]") || stristr(output, " GM") || strstr(output, "GM") || stristr(output, "[GM]") || stristr(output, "(GM)") || stristr(output, "{GM}") ||
stristr(output, "Skype") || stristr(output, "discord") || stristr(output, "facebook")) {
clif_colormes(sd->fd, color_table[COLOR_RED], "You are only allowed to type a maximum of 3 spaces in a row.");
return;
}
}

// send message to others (using the send buffer for temp. storage)
clif_GlobalMessage(&sd->bl,output,sd->chatID ? CHAT_WOS : AREA_CHAT_WOC);


Example of what it looks like:

[itsmonoxd]

5. Say to me, who is Asian, that all the players who try to bribe her are Asian. None of the white players. Prefix that with, I'm not racist BUT. Why, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you were...perhaps...racist?? Btw, Saga is German.

I love how its necessary to point out that Saga is german while stating she/he is a racist. You are probably someone that thinks every single fckn german is a racist. Suck it up. You got scammed.
Stop badmouthing Saga just because your were stupid enough to get scammed. Getting scammed in-game is already stupid but even going as far as to grant someone you dont really know full remote access on your pc is just beyond wild....