preludes wrote:
Catwho wrote:
It's cute that you thing the RMT are spending their own money to do that.
There is a huge, HUGE black market for stolen credit card numbers. Target was the most recent victim of a breach, with some 40 million account numbers stolen and floating out there between Thanksgiving and late December. The RMT pay someone a buck for a stolen account, and use that to buy the game with. By the time SE gets around to banning them and refunding the money to the credit card account holder, the RMT account has already made a couple thousand dollars.
That's one reason SE put in place their Secure Mastercard and Visa requirements in FFXI some years ago. The charge backs the RMT were causing ended up costing a lot of money and headaches.
Why would you do that, it costs more to buy a stolen CC number than to buy the game. You face real life consequences for doing that too.
If you could spent $30 and make $200 are you telling me you wouldn't do it? RMT are no different than you or me, if they can see they can spend some money to make far more they will do it lol CC number theft does happen but it's not going to happen to the levels you think it is on an MMO, not even close. Not for this kind of buisiness (keep in mind that RMT is not illegal, it's totally legit business).
You're thinking that someone would rather pay for CC numbers or steal seperate ones for thousands of accounts than just pay $30 to make hundreds of thousands from gil buyers. It's just silly, people will use the easiest method.
You're not looking at this from a perspective of a business in China, which has fewer oversights and regulations than in the US. Stolen CC numbers are cheap in their respective black markets. You don't buy just one, you buy a list of a thousand for a thousand bucks. 90% of them will be bum, but 10% of them can be used. And those hundred CC accounts can be used with impunity for a couple days, even a week, before the person discovers the fraud and calls their bank. They'll get their money back, but the damage is done, the RMT has 30 days that came with the game for free (since the game itself can't be un-registered), then they have to investigate the account and ban it, which could take another week. That's two weeks to make merry with dozens of accounts off a single credit card.
Visa and Mastercard will investigate the fraud, but the actual results from those investigations rarely pan out. When they do, it makes international news. Last one I heard was the arrest of some thieves in Russia... last year.
Probably the only one in the entire bot operation that has a legit, fully paid account would be the bank. And these are the ones SE really tries to ban because they've got 999 million gil on them, and they want that account to stay active as long as it can - so no stolen CCs and charge backs on that one.
Edited, Jan 10th 2014 1:29pm by Catwho 
