WARNING: If you receive a letter from the Argent Dawn telling you thanks for all your service to them and saying they’ve attached the present as a reward or a token of their gratitude. This reward appears as a gift-wrapped item (commonly available in many places in WoW, probably the easiest is the reward for cleaning a grime encrusted object in Gnomeragon). Anyway, it turns out this is a high price COD (100-300g typically) so do not accept it. Hit return and send it back.
So this Argent Dawn scam is not the first scam of this type, but appears to be the most prolific. I’ve received multiple of these letters (on my main and one of my alts). I know lots of people that have. I assume it is hitting other servers as well. If you’ve been hit by this scam, please post a comment preferably with what server you are on. I’d like to try to get a feel for how wide spread this is.
I’ve seen another scam, this one got me a long time ago, popping up a lot recently. I call it the Auction House Gotcha. It’s simple and it also falls in more of a gray area. It’s probably not a technical rules violation but it is evil. Basically, there are many trade items (ores, bars, leathers, herbs, cloth, etc.) that have tons of the same item listed. Because of market efficiencies these tend to fall roughly around the same price point. Often you will need many of these items, especially if you are leveling up a tradeskill, and you will just click to buy them. Click, click, click. The auction house pops-up a buyout notice with the price, but if you’re buying more than 4 or 5 you start to ignore this. And then boom, you hit the one from the jackass who put it in at ten or hundred times the normal price and you just bought a stack of something for 100g. Anyway, watchout for that one when you are buying a lot of stuff in the AH.
I’ve seen this scam 3 times in my inbox now – on Blackwater Raiders (Aliance).
My wife just got hit with this on Baelgun… ouch 🙁