>> ^MilkmanDan:

He talks as though his key mistake was personal ownership of the paypal account, but I think that really just focused the fallout on him rather than across multiple business entities. His key mistake was breaking the TOS/EULAs of the accounts that he was (re)selling, and rolling the dice that Blizzard would never catch on.
They did catch on. Personally, I think it is very difficult to prevent this sort of thing and that your best bet is to either just live with it, or change in-game things to make the motivation for it less enticing. Star Wars Galaxies had accounts for early jedi unlockers (being able to play as a jedi was originally a very rare thing) sell for multiple thousands of dollars also. Since jedi as a class was so attractive and so rare, you'd have to expect that such account sales would happen -- that is just bad design, assuming that you want to prevent such activities.
Still, it is hard to fault him too much since this was relatively uncharted territory. And, it makes for quite an interesting story!


I'm certainly not saying the guy is blameless, but his business existed because there was a need to be serviced. Buy an account, or gold, or use wowglider etc, the end user is risking their account. The whole industry is a grey market and the first rule is buyer beware.

I have no sympathy for people who pay for accounts and get them banned. They know (or should know) what they are getting in to and that they risk loss of the account. I guess it would be hard for a business to write in to it's legal stuff "Your account could be banned at any time due to your or our fault, so suck it and see!"