Trading gold safely

[tyro1978]

I want to trade my excess gold. But don't want to get banned doing it.

I have 2 accounts, my main account which is registered in my name and also another account registered in my sons name. But the address' are the same, as we both live in the same house.

If I were to just send gold to my sons account, and then use his account to trade the gold for money, could my main account get banned?

The way I see it, the main account isn't breaking any ToS, as that account is not trading for gold.

If my sons account gets banned, I'm not too bothered. He does not play it any more anyway.

My only concern is, they both run through the same IP address, and both registered to the same address.

If I am likely to receive a ban, how would I get around this?

Answers on a postcard

[frostbite]

So you want to risk your son's account instead? what kind of bad example of a parent are you! :O

[Sekan]

I once asked a similar question and got the equivalent of nothing but blank looks, as if the very concept of studying safety was too alien for anyone to have considered.

Afterwards, I experimented with selling gold (following the instructions of the experienced gold buying company), and the account was promptly banned afterwards, as well as another account of mine which had sent it the gold. (Two of my accounts were banned; other accounts of mine not so involved were not).

Blizzard tends to briefly suspend gold buyers, if doing anything at all to them, while permanently banning (not just suspending) gold sellers.

A difficulty in gold selling is that potential customers tend to be utterly stupid in their envisioned transfer methods. Blizzard is able to trivially have an automated system flag for a momentary glance by a GM any extremely unbalanced transaction of the usual obvious gold sale kind: tens of thousands of gold traded or deposited for nothing in return or for a grey or green item (with about all gold buyers not even non-retarded enough to at least use a blue or purple). That is so whether such is done by face-to-face trade, in the mail, on the AH, or into a guild bank.

There are some possibilities which might actually work, unlike the standard get-banned ways. Blizzard can't manually review every transaction. Such as tens of thousands of gold for nothing or for vendor trash in return is a transaction which happens few enough times per week per realm to be easily flagged by even the crudest programming of an automated screener. In contrast, a transfer of items with far less or no gold transferred isn't so likely to get flagged.

A working way may be to:

Convert the gold to readily-liquidifiable items, such as high-value BoE mounts, easily liquidifiable afterwards by the recipient, and so transfer 0 gold directly as only transfer items.

AND/OR

Mix effective gold transfer subtly into normal AH trading (not the common moronic "linen cloth for 50000g" but such as epics sold for a few times more than usual).

Even getting gold onto a separate account, then handing over that gold-loaded account rather than transferring the gold directly, could be better than the usual way, as the standard gold selling methods cause a permanent ban whereas a change from one U.S. IP address to a semi-distant other U.S. IP address tends to just cause a lock removable by answering the account's secret question answer online. Last time I created a trial account, it got an offer from a Blizzard ad at character select to upgrade to a WoTLK-level paid account for $5, and, unless such stopped in the past several weeks, the cost of an account with the first 30 days gametime is just $5 really. With that said, if the buyer is as foolish or uncaring as most are (not going to transfer off the gold in a gradual manner over time or with any subtlety), one account being banned can cause the banning of other accounts linked to it. A chain of subtle-transfer accounts with nothing in common (IP, flash cookies, etc., etc.) could provide safety if all was done in the right manner, but that would take more time to fully explain than the length of this post.

[tyro1978]

So you want to risk your son's account instead? what kind of bad example of a parent are you! :O

he does not play it anymore, he hates WoW, he only plays Dota2 and LoL