HMC Donation Fakers
Posted: 16 Sep 2008, 20:17
As most of you will know by now, we organize frequent events with rare hats as prizes. We also help out newer players with quests and armor. We rely mostly on item donations of our "richer" members to sponsor our game events. This system works very well for us, and people are constantly requesting us to take their donations. Since people seem to be inclined to donate more, then they are inclined to request for help, or then we can give away trough events, we even had to bring up a reward systems to give back to the community so that our stock wouldn't grow to large.
However we cannot help that many players try to take advantage of this system by making fake donation characters. We have tried combating this in several ways, by adding restrictions, by mentioning it in our newsletters. But despite our bests efforts, I still hear of a lot of players that they have fallen for these fake donation characters. How can you prevent donating to these scammers?
1. We only take donations right after events/meetings because then there's always a leader present to validate the identity. In fact these donation chars are hardly ever online.
2. We never explicitly ask or beg for donations. We never stay on-line to go look for donations. So if you see a character asking to donate to him, that's most probably a fake.
3. A list with the exact names are displayed on our website.
4. Fakers will usually try to make very small variations on genuine names:
* Slightly different words: donatings/donation instead of "donations"
* Different capitalisation: donatIons instead of donations
* Extra spaces at the end "donations ." instead of "donations" (if it exceeds a certain number of chars, the final dot will be cut)
However we cannot help that many players try to take advantage of this system by making fake donation characters. We have tried combating this in several ways, by adding restrictions, by mentioning it in our newsletters. But despite our bests efforts, I still hear of a lot of players that they have fallen for these fake donation characters. How can you prevent donating to these scammers?
1. We only take donations right after events/meetings because then there's always a leader present to validate the identity. In fact these donation chars are hardly ever online.
2. We never explicitly ask or beg for donations. We never stay on-line to go look for donations. So if you see a character asking to donate to him, that's most probably a fake.
3. A list with the exact names are displayed on our website.
4. Fakers will usually try to make very small variations on genuine names:
* Slightly different words: donatings/donation instead of "donations"
* Different capitalisation: donatIons instead of donations
* Extra spaces at the end "donations ." instead of "donations" (if it exceeds a certain number of chars, the final dot will be cut)
