With just one wrong click, the streamer sodapoppin goes bankrupt in WoW Classic. He fell for the oldest trick in the book …
The auction house of World of Warcraft is a great place to earn some gold coins. This applies to both the current WoW and the Classic version. However, one should be careful while shopping, because some nasty individuals try to swindle gold there as well. The streamer sodapoppin recently fell victim to such a trick …
What happened? The streamer sodapoppin wanted to buy some large mana potions in the auction house of Thunder Bluff with his druid to prepare for the upcoming battles. To do this, he went to the auction house and searched for the potions. The price on his realm is between 5 and 6 gold per potion. He clicks randomly through the list, buying a few potions here and there.
However, he is not very attentive and also clicks on an offer whose price does not really fit the usual range. The bid price for 5 potions was 25 gold, but the buyout price was 926 gold – almost 37 times the normal price. Just two clicks later, this amount went directly to the shady seller, who can now be happy about the hefty sum.
This is what happened next: Sodapoppin does not notice his devastating mistake at first. He buys more potions, but at more reasonable prices. It is only when this is no longer possible – because he does not have enough gold – that he stops. He stares in disbelief at the screen for a few seconds, opens his inventory, and checks the remaining gold amount. Only then does it dawn on him that he has apparently done something very stupid and has fallen for a very nasty trick.
How did the “fraudster” proceed here? The method to lure people into careless clicks and purchases in the auction house is quite old. The usual approach is that one sets an offer at a relatively cheap “bid” price, but lists an extremely high price for the “buyout”. This way, the items are offered in the list among the other cheap items. If one is careless – like sodapoppin – it can easily happen that one spends all their gold.
A mistake like this can be avoided quite simply using various addons that manage the auction house. However, in this case, simply being more attentive while playing would have helped.
A lesson that sodapoppin has surely learned now, as nearly 1,000 gold is a significant amount of money in WoW.
Have you ever made such a mistake in the auction house? Or are you more likely the profiteers who deliberately set such offers in the auction house?
