Warning - Wintersday Gift Scam

Just a heads up. Some joker in Lions Arch was offering 250 gifts for 50k. Was tempted so I offered to buy. He put up 1 wintersday gift. After a few seconds he said "oops" and changed his offer. Then 250 "Special" presents showed up in his offer window. They use the same artwork as winterday gifts. This looked kinda fishy so I ran to the gift giver to make sure about what the gifts were called. He closed the trade and disappeared.

Anybody who's done the special kamedan wintersday quests will know that "Special" presents are worthless quest items that show up during the quest that you gotta fedex to people. I actually didn't know about these special present items because I never did the quest and I had to look up the quest info on guildwiki before I found out what they were.

As usual, rule of thumb applies. Always ALWAYS check your trades before hitting the accept button.

Good catch man, thanks for posting it.

My ten year old daughter asked me to purchase some unopened gifts for her from a guy in Kamadan since she didn't have the money at the time. I was in a hurry and just got the gifts from the guy she pointed out. Turns out she purchased 10 quest items for 1k.

Hard lesson learned for 10 year old. I ended up eating the 1K and then we had a heart to heart conversation about the wicked evil nature of people that scam others.

1k was a small price to pay for a good lesson.

PS. The guy showed no remorse. I screen the conversation I had with him but alas I didn't get a screen of the transaction itself or I would have reported him to ANET.

Titan im sorry your 10 year old daughter has to be the victim of someone and we'll think the lesson was for the best as a learning experiance.

I thought you can catch them doing something fishy if they want to switch Gift in middle of the trade?

she is 10 and it was a learning experiance.

Well will Anet pull there finger out and actually work on making NEW skins for items instead of leaving them open to be abused for scamming.

If they switch it'll say something like "Warning: The offer has been changed" or something like that.

With all the times this similar situation has happenend you would think they would have thought of that before hand wouldn't you?

well when i trade it comes up with me if they have modfied there trade. in a box in red letters this trade has been modified

Yes but the OP said first they showed 1 real gift then said "oops" and showed the 250 fake ones, like he only just forgot to load all of them into trade. I can see where that could catch someone off guard.

I had a similar thing happen to me with Singed Gargoyle Skulls and regular Gargoyle skulls. When you're buying things left and right, it's very easy to give someone the benefit of the doubt and overlook a simple switcheroo.

It's sad since it's just a game, yet people decide to hurt their own personal morality over fake currency...

People will not be happy until they make gifts non tradable (would serve the scammers right). Good catch.

I know but it's funny how scammers isn't afraid of the changes A-Net done to the trade window to prevent peoples from doing this. I thought that most peoples would see the "Warning: Items has been modified or changed" message before doing the trade? I know she is 10 but just saying in general, if I see that message, I would question the seller or re-look at the items again.

Well knowing how fast the spam in Lions Arch goes by, I lost his name in the spam while going to the wintersday giftgiver npc to check up on the item. But I tried to add the guy's name to my list of friend (my friends list is mostly names of scammers I've run into so I can keep track of them ) but it said the name no longer existed. So either I spelt it wrong, or the guy got paranoid of me catching him and deleted the char, or god forbid he managed to unload his junk on some poor sap and deleted the char before he could get tracked. I hope it wasn't the latter. Then again, there's also a part of me that hopes if he did delete his character, that he forgot to remove his ill gotten money from it beforehand I lost 10k while rerolling my dervish when I messed up survivor so it is pretty easy to overlook

Normally I'd be pretty cynical of deals like this too, but somebody in ascalon sold me 79 candycane shards for 500g (total) so I figured it was some guy who was looking to make some really quick cash and didn't value wintersday gifts very much.

i saw the same guy selling those 250 gifts for 50k. ive become pretty cynical when it comes to trades that seem too good to be true but i thought id check it out anyways. he showed me the 250 quest item gifts right off the bat so i just closed trade.
i used to report scammers with screen shots and spam warnings in all chat but there seem to be so many scammers that i just cant be bothered anymore.

Hmm yeah that sucks for whoever falls for it but at least he was more creative with his scams then simply the lame shit i usually get were they switch like from 50k gold to 50 and its like umm dude iam not some 8 yr old with an eye patch get real. Btw if your actually interested in presents go check my friend of course there not gonna be like 50k for a stack because mine are you know actually real but yeah lol.

im going to look out for this scam..and when he puts 250 (or however many gifts in) il just change my money (scamming a scammer) :P

Unfortunately, that is what happens often times on the internet. Since they view it as just a game they don't think about how it affects real people. Because of the anonymity(sp?) of the internet people will do all sorts of things that they wouldn't even consider doing in the "real world". A classic example of this is downloading free music from file sharing sites. Unless you pay for it, it's 99.99% theft; however, most of those people wouldn't even think of walking into a store and stealing a CD.

That is not how this happened. The items were not changed. My daughter asked me to buy Winter Gifts for her.

I opened up the trade saw what looked like presents (Never heard of the quest item) and completed the trade. Only when she tried to open the presents did we discover the scam.

It's not a matter of the trade being swapped. The guy advertised unopened Christmas presents (Something that does not exist but we took that to mean the Wintersday Presents that CAN be opened in the game. Instead he sold some worthless quest item that can not be opened and that we did not even know existed.) Had we already had presents in inventory, we may or may not have taken the time to compare the description with what was traded. In most cases I trust people at thier word. It seems that you can do this less and less.

Like I said...the 1k lost was a small price to pay for a big lesson. My daughters (and I) now have to be even more aware about the details every trade we make in game and out. It is a good lesson to learn in a game. This same type of con happens every day in the real world too. I learned about the dark nature of some people in my first job. One of the tellers I worked with was fast changed $90 out of her register not once but twice in the same week. Maybe this lesson in game will preclude a more costly lesson in the future.