Smuggler Archive
Thread: The bans have started...
Setavis
Thu Aug 19, 2004 1:29 pm
#27
Chances are your freinds account has been suspended, not banned per se.
I doubt SOE are going to start banning people outright unless there is direct evidence of a person being involved in the scam in the first instance. They just wantto stopdirty money circulating through the economy while they investigate further, so will suspend a lot of people as a precaution.
As was said above, the devs seem to keep pretty comprehensive logs, not just character bank accounts and credit transactions, but chat logs, vendor stocks, possibly even inventories etc.I supposethey will be looking for suspicious credit activity and then looking forcorroboration from other sources.
If your freind was buffing, there is a chance that he received dirty money, in bank tips, directly from those responsible for the scam. This mightpossibly "incriminating" him, but will probably be easily explained. It may be that he has a large cash turn over and this was flagged, or it may be that he had an atypical cash turnover for his character, e.g a vastly increased cash turnover, or maybe there is a specific type ofunusualbehavior that is getting flagged as indicative of the cred dupe(e.g. removing large amounts of cash from a city or guild hall), but could also be quite inoccent. After all, these kind of transactions will be the easiest to identify in the first instance and the devs may be reacting overzealosly.
Remember, we are paying customers and I'm sure everyone will be given a chance to put their case before a final decision is made, especially where there is such a potential grey area.
PhoenixOrion
Thu Aug 19, 2004 1:37 pm
#28
I still think this is going to hurt any and all smugglers who rely on FP for an income for the next several days. 
shagalot
Thu Aug 19, 2004 2:42 pm
#29
yeah go to the kettemoore server, jesus christ its nothing but "IVE BEEN BANNED" and "FREE THE BANNED" posts
Qojan
Thu Aug 19, 2004 3:21 pm
#31
this sounds like "the end of the world" I hope SOE gets it together soon. If stuff like this goes on much longer SWG will be one lonely place.
Zandergeef
Thu Aug 19, 2004 4:22 pm
#32
I wasnt hit... I did travel by the guy that was doing the 1 million tips in coronet(he also bank tipped a lot of people) but as any good smuggler I steared clear of that and quickly boarded the transport to dantooine to make some real money.
Some people who are in the clear have been banned and hopefully they will get there accounts activated again, looks like people who got tiped money in a transaction are the ones being banned. I dont know all the details but I steared my guild clear of any big expenditures.
Thochkored
Thu Aug 19, 2004 10:24 pm
#33
I sold about 40 Crates of Clamps to a player just before or about the time the dupe was anounced, so far I haven't been warned or banned. Hopefully I'm clean, the guy I sold them to seemed to be alright.
Dessimus
Fri Aug 20, 2004 3:13 am
#34
My friend / guild leader has been banned. He didn't even know why. It took him multiple emails/phone calls just to find out why. This is what happened. Someone was advertising on the trade forum that they were buying high OQ meat for XXcpu. So he goes hunting for a few days and gets a nice stack of it. He goes to offer it to the guys vendor. The guy buys it but the problem is that he buys it with duped credits. My friend immediately tips half the money to his other account. Tries to log on the next day, and both accounts are banned. SOE claims that there is no way to prove that he didn't conspire with this guy. What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Guess that doesn't exsist here in SOEland. This is total sh!t. How are we supposed to know if someone is buying our stuff with duped creds? I think that the margin for error with this issue is way to high to have them going and banning everyone with duped credits. Imagine if everything you have spent soooo many hours working on for the last year was taken away and you did nothing wrong. This really has me fired up almost to the point of wanting to quit SWG and I know several of our guildmates feel the same. We are a very small, tight knit group soas nerdy as it may sound, this really has a very profoundaffect on us.Not only was this person my guild leader but he is someone that I have been talking to in some form or another on an almost daily basis for the past year. boooo SOE
PhoenixOrion
Fri Aug 20, 2004 3:40 am
#35
I wonder if anybody has considered suing SOE if they permanently ban an account due to being griefed by people with duped creds...
Nicolas_Frost
Fri Aug 20, 2004 4:28 am
#36
I know if they suddenly banned me for unknowingly recieving fraudulent money, I'd sure as hell take legal action.
I mean, much of this is just plain stupid. I work at a motel, and lets say I get a policeman come in here one day to arrest me, my manager, and the motel owner 'cause some idiot payed me with counterfit bills one night. That's the equivilent that's happening here. I can *sorta* understand a simple three-four day ban while they scour your transactions and follow up on a procedure, but here's an idea, let the person who's subscribed know about this, shortly before you do the temporary lockout and transaction scan, so at least they know what exactly is going on, and that letting the devs look through the bank logs helps them track down the culprits.
If they let me know about things ahead of time, I could step outta the account for two or three days. Hell. I'd take the time to work on my alt some.
I mean, much of this is just plain stupid. I work at a motel, and lets say I get a policeman come in here one day to arrest me, my manager, and the motel owner 'cause some idiot payed me with counterfit bills one night. That's the equivilent that's happening here. I can *sorta* understand a simple three-four day ban while they scour your transactions and follow up on a procedure, but here's an idea, let the person who's subscribed know about this, shortly before you do the temporary lockout and transaction scan, so at least they know what exactly is going on, and that letting the devs look through the bank logs helps them track down the culprits.
If they let me know about things ahead of time, I could step outta the account for two or three days. Hell. I'd take the time to work on my alt some.
Message Edited by Nicolas_Frost on 08-20-2004 06:36 AM
Daak_Gelrin
Fri Aug 20, 2004 4:48 am
#37
me?? I drink beer and smile... till I get banned for selling a forward outpost to some punk for duped money.
Then... I get mad, real mad.... they wouldn't like me when I'm angry. I turn green, grow and split all my clothes and generally have a bad disposition...
Vrond
Fri Aug 20, 2004 5:33 am
#38
The Damage is far greater then I had first though many frineds banned and I can count at least 6 servers where its happened I am going to quote a long post from the merchant board that explains what has happend.
I have seven Merchants on seven different galaxies. Each character runs a thriving business of small-to-medium size.
Every one of them went out of business yesterday... in self defense. A plague has struck, an economic form of the Black Death.
My characters sit huddled in a corner in fear, not knowing if this is the end of their days.
The money supply is infected, and the in-game government has stated that they will cut the infection out with a flaming sword. It's the death penalty for everyone infected.
Monday's announcement read as follows:
-----
"… A credit dupe has surfaced. We are aware of it, and have put a solution in place.
We know who did it. We log everyone’s financial transactions, including WHO AND WHERE THE MONEY IS TRANSFERRED TO.
Please be careful of receiving large sums of money from anyone.
We are going to suspend, and then ban anyone who has participated in this dupe, which includes transfer or reception of funds.
If you know of a PA hall that has received these funds, DO NOT attempt to retrieve any money... this will flag you as dirty as well. And anyone you transfer money to becomes dirty as well. And so on...
We take this extremely seriously, and will go to great lengths to protect your play experience."
-----
Unscrupulous players had uncovered a bug which allowed for counterfeiting of in-game money: credits. They began exploiting this bug heavily, and produced literally billions of credits. All of these credits appear identical to players, there is no way for someone receiving them to know that they are counterfeit.
Ebay listings began to appear with insanely large amounts of credits for sale, for much lower than market rates.
A check of the message boards revealed that these players began an effort to "launder" these counterfeit funds in a variety of ways. They started outbidding everyone in trade auctions for insane amounts. Merchant vendors offering tens of millions of credits in inventory were stripped bare in minutes.
Anything and everything valuable that was for sale was bought.
And now we wait for the axe to fall on the innocent and the guilty alike.
Duplication bugs are the bane of existence for MMORPGs. They can completely wreck any game's internal economy in either direction: duplication of currency can cause hyperinflation, while duplication of valuable items can cause an item value crash.
The developers of SWG are right to take a stand against those who have done this, and for that they are to be applauded. However, their fear-inspiring tactics may end up doing vastly more damage than the duplication itself.
There are three basic desires that are in conflict in addressing this issue:
1. A desire to contain and eliminate the economic impact of the counterfeited credits. If the credits are left in the economy, hyper-inflation can wreck the economic base of the game.
2. A desire to punish those who are guilty of thise action, and to ensure that they do not profit from this exploitation. Just as in the real world, this means tracking down attempts to launder the funds that pass through legitimate businesses.
3. A desire to cause no harm to those who are innocent of any wrongdoing... those caught up as "collateral damage" in the disaster.
The developers have a huge advantage over real-world criminal investigators: they have logs which show all transactions that take place in the game. This enables them to see the flow of credits in every transaction.
The devs appear to be focusing their efforts on addressing the first of these two issues, but it is quite likely that point three will be the major point of contention.
In the real world, if you receive counterfeit money for goods, the government will confiscate all of the counterfeit bills without compensation. You don't get your stuff back, and you don't get the money either. You, the merchant, bear the economic brunt of the counterfeiting.
If the devs want to eliminate the economic impact of the counterfeit credits, they must delete them. Without doing so, the money supply increase will cause massive inflation. Who will bear the brunt for lost valuable items on banned account purchased with counterfeit credits?
The devs have to track the money through these transactions, because the dupers are using "legitimate" purchases to launder their funds. If they don't, the dupers will remain fabulously wealthy by transferring the wealth to other innocent-appearing accounts through any number of levels of buy-and-sell laundering, and bans will have no real effect of punishment.
After the announcement that the dupe had been discovered, the message boards began to be flooded by reports of dupers using their ill-gotten gains as a weapon.
They began tipping millions of credits to random strangers, and more importantly, donating them to their enemies in hopes that they, too, would be caught in the purge to come.
If they couldn't keep their stolen wealth, they were going to take as many people down with them as possible. Money had become a weapon of mass destruction.
Given the policy of "dirty" flagging as outlined by the developers, every transaction by the dupers with someone innocent marked all of the innocent person's funds as "dirty" as well. All of that person's legitimate transactions would likewise mark everyone they dealt with as "dirty". Legitimate business had become an infection vector for the mark of guilt.
Today, no one can perform an economic transaction with anyone else, without the fear that they will be punished despite doing nothing wrong at all.
The devs have spelled out a crystal-clear message: if you receive duped credits, your account will be suspended and banned. But since there is no way for anyone to know if the person who just bought something from your vendor while you were logged off was a duper (or someone who sold something to someone... who sold something to someone... who sold something to a duper), every transaction carries with it the very real risk that you will lose EVERYTHING you worked for in the game.
Commerce has become the ultimate communicable disease, and infection carries the death penalty, because of the mechanics of the "serious treatment" position taken by the devs.
The dupers must be laughing all the way to the bank.
I'm completely paralyzed. I can't make an economic move without risking losing EVERYTHING. I might already be infected and not know it... someone could have bought something from one of my vendors with infected credits. Almost a year's worth of work could disappear overnight.
If no one bought things from me with dirty credits, my only hope of keeping my account free of the stigma of the "dirty" flag is to never sell or buy anything. I can't go out in public either, because a drive-by tipper might send me free money, and I CANNOT REFUSE TO ACCEPT IT. The game has no such mechanic for refusal. All of my legitimate money would become infected too, as soon as I received the duped credits.
So in self defense, I pulled down every single item from my vendors. 40 to 50 million credits worth of inventory on some galaxies. I'm out of business until I can get some kind of GUARANTEE from the developers that I'm not going to become an innocent-bystander collateral-damage victim of their effort to punish the guilty.
Without such a guarantee, the developers have done vastly more economic damage to the game and the state of the economy than the dupers could ever have hoped to.
Every one of them went out of business yesterday... in self defense. A plague has struck, an economic form of the Black Death.
My characters sit huddled in a corner in fear, not knowing if this is the end of their days.
The money supply is infected, and the in-game government has stated that they will cut the infection out with a flaming sword. It's the death penalty for everyone infected.
Monday's announcement read as follows:
-----
"… A credit dupe has surfaced. We are aware of it, and have put a solution in place.
We know who did it. We log everyone’s financial transactions, including WHO AND WHERE THE MONEY IS TRANSFERRED TO.
Please be careful of receiving large sums of money from anyone.
We are going to suspend, and then ban anyone who has participated in this dupe, which includes transfer or reception of funds.
If you know of a PA hall that has received these funds, DO NOT attempt to retrieve any money... this will flag you as dirty as well. And anyone you transfer money to becomes dirty as well. And so on...
We take this extremely seriously, and will go to great lengths to protect your play experience."
-----
Unscrupulous players had uncovered a bug which allowed for counterfeiting of in-game money: credits. They began exploiting this bug heavily, and produced literally billions of credits. All of these credits appear identical to players, there is no way for someone receiving them to know that they are counterfeit.
Ebay listings began to appear with insanely large amounts of credits for sale, for much lower than market rates.
A check of the message boards revealed that these players began an effort to "launder" these counterfeit funds in a variety of ways. They started outbidding everyone in trade auctions for insane amounts. Merchant vendors offering tens of millions of credits in inventory were stripped bare in minutes.
Anything and everything valuable that was for sale was bought.
And now we wait for the axe to fall on the innocent and the guilty alike.
Duplication bugs are the bane of existence for MMORPGs. They can completely wreck any game's internal economy in either direction: duplication of currency can cause hyperinflation, while duplication of valuable items can cause an item value crash.
The developers of SWG are right to take a stand against those who have done this, and for that they are to be applauded. However, their fear-inspiring tactics may end up doing vastly more damage than the duplication itself.
There are three basic desires that are in conflict in addressing this issue:
1. A desire to contain and eliminate the economic impact of the counterfeited credits. If the credits are left in the economy, hyper-inflation can wreck the economic base of the game.
2. A desire to punish those who are guilty of thise action, and to ensure that they do not profit from this exploitation. Just as in the real world, this means tracking down attempts to launder the funds that pass through legitimate businesses.
3. A desire to cause no harm to those who are innocent of any wrongdoing... those caught up as "collateral damage" in the disaster.
The developers have a huge advantage over real-world criminal investigators: they have logs which show all transactions that take place in the game. This enables them to see the flow of credits in every transaction.
The devs appear to be focusing their efforts on addressing the first of these two issues, but it is quite likely that point three will be the major point of contention.
In the real world, if you receive counterfeit money for goods, the government will confiscate all of the counterfeit bills without compensation. You don't get your stuff back, and you don't get the money either. You, the merchant, bear the economic brunt of the counterfeiting.
If the devs want to eliminate the economic impact of the counterfeit credits, they must delete them. Without doing so, the money supply increase will cause massive inflation. Who will bear the brunt for lost valuable items on banned account purchased with counterfeit credits?
The devs have to track the money through these transactions, because the dupers are using "legitimate" purchases to launder their funds. If they don't, the dupers will remain fabulously wealthy by transferring the wealth to other innocent-appearing accounts through any number of levels of buy-and-sell laundering, and bans will have no real effect of punishment.
After the announcement that the dupe had been discovered, the message boards began to be flooded by reports of dupers using their ill-gotten gains as a weapon.
They began tipping millions of credits to random strangers, and more importantly, donating them to their enemies in hopes that they, too, would be caught in the purge to come.
If they couldn't keep their stolen wealth, they were going to take as many people down with them as possible. Money had become a weapon of mass destruction.
Given the policy of "dirty" flagging as outlined by the developers, every transaction by the dupers with someone innocent marked all of the innocent person's funds as "dirty" as well. All of that person's legitimate transactions would likewise mark everyone they dealt with as "dirty". Legitimate business had become an infection vector for the mark of guilt.
Today, no one can perform an economic transaction with anyone else, without the fear that they will be punished despite doing nothing wrong at all.
The devs have spelled out a crystal-clear message: if you receive duped credits, your account will be suspended and banned. But since there is no way for anyone to know if the person who just bought something from your vendor while you were logged off was a duper (or someone who sold something to someone... who sold something to someone... who sold something to a duper), every transaction carries with it the very real risk that you will lose EVERYTHING you worked for in the game.
Commerce has become the ultimate communicable disease, and infection carries the death penalty, because of the mechanics of the "serious treatment" position taken by the devs.
The dupers must be laughing all the way to the bank.
I'm completely paralyzed. I can't make an economic move without risking losing EVERYTHING. I might already be infected and not know it... someone could have bought something from one of my vendors with infected credits. Almost a year's worth of work could disappear overnight.
If no one bought things from me with dirty credits, my only hope of keeping my account free of the stigma of the "dirty" flag is to never sell or buy anything. I can't go out in public either, because a drive-by tipper might send me free money, and I CANNOT REFUSE TO ACCEPT IT. The game has no such mechanic for refusal. All of my legitimate money would become infected too, as soon as I received the duped credits.
So in self defense, I pulled down every single item from my vendors. 40 to 50 million credits worth of inventory on some galaxies. I'm out of business until I can get some kind of GUARANTEE from the developers that I'm not going to become an innocent-bystander collateral-damage victim of their effort to punish the guilty.
Without such a guarantee, the developers have done vastly more economic damage to the game and the state of the economy than the dupers could ever have hoped to.
On Ahazi many of the biggest merchants are banned most of the other big timers are shutting down or have shut down.
Ipseck
Fri Aug 20, 2004 7:48 am
#39
ya.. It really hasn't touched kauri at all. The only people I've seen posting on the kauri forums are people from other servers coming in with their sob stories. With the level of logging they claim to have on financial transactions, I am extremely skeptical of anyone running to the forums with some story, especially those with only 4 total messages on their forum accounts.