PLEASE NOT BEFORE READING FURTHER: THIS SCAM IS VERY SIMPLE TO EXECUTE BUT PROBABLY ON A HIGHER DIFFICULTY/TIME LEVEL THAN MOST. I CAN USUALLY PULL IT OFF IN 1-3 HOURS AND EARN MYSELF A GOOD PROFIT BUT IF YOUR NOT ONE WHO HAS THE ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE WELL OR PAY ATTENTION TO DETAIL YOU MAY WANT TO LOOK ELSEWHERE.
I had the idea to sell fake Sunwell Patterns after I noticed quite a few threads on the wow forums and various other sources not only complaining about the drop rate of Sunwell Trash Patterns but also with people offering to buy the patterns for ridiculous amount's of gold. The prices range from 5,000-50,000 from my research and so far I've had very good success with this scam.
Requirements:
1. WoW Account, Doesn't have to be BC enabled, just a working, non-trial account that isn't banned or anything.
2. Atlas Loot or some form of Loot linking system
3. Some common knowledge and communication skills
Recommendations:
1. Use a scammed account or an account you don't care about to perform the scam. I'm sure the ban rate can be high with this scam and it's best not to lose your main character(s)
2. Learn how to effectively money launder, there are various threads throughout the boards describing how to do this. Blizzard can probably track you down no matter how hard your try but if you attempt to make the sale half way legitimate and can launder the gold well your odds of being warned/suspended/banned will be much lower.
Step By Step:
1. Do some research on the various sunwell patterns available, how many have dropped, and how much people are willing to pay for them. I did this by browsing various wow forums, doing searches, and asking members of high-end raiding guilds. The most popular patterns seem to be the Sunfire Robe and some of the jewel crafting BOE stuff.
2. Find your victim, the easiest way to do this and my personal method was just to browse around the forums and pay attention to trade chat. It might take you a little time to find a victim as not everyone is capable/willing to spend so much gold on an item. But rest assured there are bound to be a few opportunities to make some easy gold.
*Your going to want to find ad's like "WTB: Sunfire Robe, PST" blah blah. I found an ad where a guy was offering 15,000 gold for the Pattern, had some people saying it was going to be more or never for sale, and had a few other people in the thread offering to buy and such.
3. Your next step is going to be preparing for the scam. Find a well known guild on the server your doing your scam on, obviously a guild that is at least killing a few bosses in Sunwell and is decently respected. Example: Righteous Dawn on Azgalor
-Find 4-5 guild members using wowarmory and write down there names. You will need this to refer to your personal character when performing the scam. The reason your choosing 4-5 is so you can hopefully find a member that isn't online at the time of the scam.
-Create a level 1 character and give it a creative but reasonable bank name that sounds like it could be a guild bank for the specific guild your dealing with. Example: rdawngbank
-Take this character into a main city and if your victim isn't currently online wait for him/her, or proceed to do more research. I've been lucky enough to target pretty active people who are extremely anxious to get there hands on a pattern.
-Whisper them and say something along the lines of "Hey are you still looking to purchase "So and So Pattern"?
When they respond with a Yes tell them "Well we happened to have some pretty good drop rates and are looking to sell one of the patterns, this is "So and So from Whatever Guild" what would you be able to offer?
*Notice how I put the explanation of who I'm claiming to be in the middle right before the offer part, this way they focus on the last part and although they will see who you are they won't pay much attention most of the time. This way you look more legitimate but also aren't focusing on verification.
-When they offer a price you can either choose to accept or deny it, usually I try to negotiate a little bit just to seem honest and fair about the whole thing. Once a price is settle you need to move on and discuss how your going to do the payment.
-Usually I tell them that I'm just authorized to accept the gold into the guild bank than transfer the pattern from my main character to them. They are most likely going to assume your legitimate and not expect to be scammed using this method so they will normally go along with it. Tell them they will need to trade the gold to your guild bank character and then wait while you switch to your main character to trade them the pattern.
*If any any point they ask for any type of verification or wonder why your bank isn't in the guild you need to be able to use your communication skills.
Examples:
Them: "So how come the bank isn't in the guild"
You: "Mainly for security reasons, our guild banks are often targeted by hackers/scammers so our main banks aren't usually in the guild. Especially not for this amount of gold, plus officers have access to everything and it's a bit dangerous to just have so much avaliable"
Them: "How come you can't just trade the pattern on your main character"
You: "Well the money needs to be put directly into the guild bank, there is no profit in this for me I'm just doing it so we can have the gold to progress further in sunwell. Plus this bank isn't on my personal account and we like to keep things separated, at least trading from a bank toon won't be as obvious to blizzard as using a normal character and makes things a lot easier overall"
*You can obviously use your own style of convincing but most of the time you won't have any problems with it, the beauty of the scam is it hasn't been used before, people are extremely anxious to get these rare items. And they aren't expecting supposing members of high-end guilds to scam people. Also the majority of wow players, obviously ones who don't read these forums or haven't seen this post, aren't going to be suspicious very often or expect to be scammed. Especially since they trust so much in Blizzard.
Closing the Scam
1. Once you've gotten the gold you simply need to start your money laundering process. The first thing I do is run a little ways away from the person, into the banking area or around a corner or something so they can't see your target of target. I then trade the gold from my level 1 scammed account toon, into another 1 of my scammed account level 1 banks.
I then log out, delete that character, re-create it, and then do a little bit of messing around/mob killing, whatever to throw things off. I trade the gold from this character and mail it to my other level 1 alt on the 2nd scammed account, then trade it to a bank on my main character and put it in my alternate gbank. So forth and so on, there are much better guides to money laundering and I would suggest you read them.
2. The person you just scammed will probably notice in a few moments and will start talking to guild members who of course have no idea what's going on. Eventually your supposed character will log and they will realize once and for all they have been scammed, then they open a ticket and the investigation or whatever begins.
You can use various other forms of protection but for simplicity sake I tried to keep it simple, for instance you can trade them a receipt for the gold on your level 1... basically something wrapped up or a letter saying "Sunfire Robe as Described" And try to go with an alternate route saying you gave them what was advertised and sold, I've heard of this working and failing.
Either way if you cover your tracks, follow instructions, and improvise a bit I'm sure this scam will be successful for you.
Your going to want to do this fairly quickly before word gets around on your server and people become more difficult to scam. You'll also want to make sure your converting as many scams as possible, considering the opportunities are a little bit lower than most you need to make sure you scam as many people as possible.
So far I've scammed 3 people using this, the first 1 for a Sunfire Robe Pattern for 15k, the second one I told I was going to use my materials and make the Sunfire Glove's and charged him 12k, and the third I offered an engineering pattern to for 5k gold.
It's best to make up various stategies for each thing your trying to sell and adapt to the situation. You'll want to have an AIM ready if they want to discuss it there and also be prepared to improvise and /pray the character your claiming to be doesn't log-on. If your familiar with your server you should be able to choose accordingly and it's nice if you can scout /ask the player his normal play times or just monitor it to avoid any complications.
You can also completely avoid mentioning you fake character name and just use the bank character and hope they think that's legit. Like I said I've gotten 3 people so far for over 30,000 gold in the last week since I've been doing this. I failed on 1 attempt in which he wanted me to trade it to him on a 70 and didn't believe my backstory.
It's kind of hit and miss but I hope this can give some good ideas to someone, and even if you can only sell one pattern for 10-20k gold it's much better than doing dailies, farming, and some of the other scams around.
*Please do a search to protect yourself using proxies and anything over the web when it comes to scamming .And also how to launder money/information in world of warcraft, including creating and deleting characters, deleting system folders, using guild banks and so on. Please let me know if you find this information useful/unique. I know there are similar scams around but figured this one to be unique as it uses my personal methods along with the untapped Sunwell resource. I'm hoping to help some people out and if this thread helps some people I will probably spend more time expanding it and making the formation a bit better than current.