New dupes!

[Laraven]

So yeah ready for round two?

....on my server today, 3 lvl 1's selling Spectral Tiger Cubs, Dragon Kits and Ethereal Soul-Traders!

For sure a Chinese person as I talked to 2 of them.

[Laraven]

ok, so I kept talking to this guy. His English is not so terrible as most of them. I have the whole convo screen shotted. He is telling me how hard it is to live there and make money. And going on about how his job is not fun, and it's bad.... So yeah I feel really bad for these poor ppl over there. And since blizz won't fix these issues, idk I guess I don't blame them for doing what they do. Are stolen Credit cards used? Does anyone know how this works?

[Luciandk]

Most so called dupes, is according to blizzard stolen from compromised accounts and lumped together on a seller account.

Players just have a tendency of thinking it duping when someone sells a lot of a rare item. When they are just stolen merchandise harvested from a lot of compromised accounts.

[Faelar]

Most so called dupes, is according to blizzard stolen from compromised accounts and lumped together on a seller account.

Players just have a tendency of thinking it duping when someone sells a lot of a rare item. When they are just stolen merchandise harvested from a lot of compromised accounts.

And I have some swamp land to sell you in Florida. I'm sorry there is 0 chance of the spectral tiger cubs being 'compromised accounts'. Because the people selling them were using brand new level 1 accounts that had no achievement points or 10 achievement points earning the Going Down achievement. They had MULTIPLE spectral cubs to sell. There was not that many spectral cubs around with PERIOD.

And ALL of them are level 6. ALL OF THEM. Every single one. Not one of them was 1-5 or 7-25 on these dupers. So you can believe the BS blizzard spews on it or you can open your eyes and realize there is a duped pet going around.

[Laraven]

"And I have some swamp land to sell you in Florida."

I'm not sure that's how the saying goes, but WTB swamplands to play with da baby gators!

Anyways, yeah more lvl 1's selling Dragon Kite and ST. I can assume we will start seeing a lot of this now. The only thing we can do is report them asap, other then that our hands are tired, and there goes all the TCG pets.

At this point, I really wish Blizz would slow down with the pets they are adding to game. I would like to cherish each one, but there is just too many, and it's kinda losing it's charm for me now.

[Gilneas]

Because the people selling them were using brand new level 1 accounts that had no achievement points or 10 achievement points earning the Going Down achievement.

That means nothing. They create new accounts which they mail their stolen goods to to sell. They don't actually do their selling from compromised accounts.

[Derezzed]

Yep. There have been batches of level 6 spectral tiger cubs being sold on both the ally & horde AH's on my realm too for the last few weeks. They're milking it for all it's worth. A lvl1 was selling one in trade about a month ago & when I asked how much, 80k was the answer. Of course I bought it because they had been 160k minimum, and pretty rarely seen up until that point. Now there are several up all the time for 60k or less and always a level 1 selling in trade.

When I bought mine the seller did not have it on him. He made me wait about two minutes and then another lv90 appeared to trade with him before making the trade to me... Weird, but I have read about other people experiencing the same process when buying crimson deathchargers, jeweled onyx panthers & other things which people figure are dupes.

[GrosBonda]

Because the people selling them were using brand new level 1 accounts that had no achievement points or 10 achievement points earning the Going Down achievement.

That means nothing. They create new accounts which they mail their stolen goods to to sell. They don't actually do their selling from compromised accounts.

but the fact all the cub are lvl 6 , when i say all it is really ALL....
i dont see them take the time lvl all their stolen material to 6 just for the fun of it....

[Worgenbait]

Because ALL of the cubs being sold are level 6, they pretty much have to be duplicated. Not much of any other answer is really understandable. Question is, why are so many different people doing the same thing? If it was one person who hacked the codes or programming, why are so many competing and driving the price down so much? THAT is what doesn't make sense. It's not likely that that many people are buying so many copies off one person to try and turn them around. So does that mean it's a single incompetent organization driving their own prices down, or is the code for duplicating on some hacker website and a lot of them are exploiting it? That in my mind is the question.

[Poofah]

If it was one person who hacked the codes or programming, why are so many competing and driving the price down so much?

Just to be clear, we are talking about Spectral Tiger Cubs here, but:

The simplest answer is that since a duped item is free, then every sale is profit no matter the price.

There may be competing dupers or there may not, but it doesn't really matter on our end. The inevitable outcome is that the dupers will continue selling until they're stopped (not happening, obviously) or until the price drops so low that it's no longer profitable. That price isn't zero, because it costs them time/money to make new seller accounts as the old ones get banned. But the price floor isn't very high either, as we saw with Deathchargers and epic gems.

There have been batches of level 6 spectral tiger cubs being sold on both the ally & horde AH's on my realm too for the last few weeks.

We should be careful to distinguish: the dupers are not the ones selling on AH, as the AH draws attention to the seller and the seller can easily be banned/suspended before they receive the AH payment. Lvl6 cubs on AH are almost certainly cubs that were bought by legit players with the intention of flipping for a profit. Maybe those legit players had reason to suspect the cubs, or maybe they didn't.


As for Dragon Kite/Soul-Trader: I have been monitoring the AH situation for these for several weeks, ever since the cub issue became apparent. But so far I'm not seeing any evidence on AHs for an abnormally large influx of these. Obviously that doesn't prove that there's not a dupe happening though. The cub situation went from lvl1 spammers to large AH influxes over the course of roughly 2 weeks (because again, the AH examples are already at least 1 transaction downstream of the dupers).

I am very curious whether these suspected Kites/Soul-Traders are level 6, or any other particular level. If it's 1 or 25, then we have no hope of tracking them, but any other level would let us follow their spread.

[Laraven]

Just a bit more info on the new dupes...

Fact #1. The Dragon Kites and ST are all lvl 1. The Spectral Tiger Cubs are all lvl 6.
Fact #2. The sellers are competing in price for sales. They are not all from the same place.
Fact #3. Not many Spectral Tiger Cubs made it to my AH at first. It took a month after the dupers selling in trade for one to appear. So not seeing a rise in AH pets, is not clear way to know if the dupes are happening or not on any server.

The Duper called the Soul-Trader a "Soul Businessman" LOL! He even admitted to knowing they were duped and that was he was doing was wrong. He also said he didn't know how they were made and that he needed to feed his sister and disliked his job. His /trade spam was "I have only one Dragon Kite for CHEAP pst!" Even though offered me as many as I wanted. When I asked about mounts, he said He had to sell 12 mounts in order to get mounts to sell. idk...

BTW, these ARE copies of codes. Not stolen pets from hacked accounts. I really hope you don't believe Blizz on that post because it's not true. It proves they have not actually "investigated" crap! We are the majority of wow's pet lover here on this website have any of you EVER been hacked and had you pets stolen? I have no auth and have never been hacked period.

[Derezzed]

We should be careful to distinguish: the dupers are not the ones selling on AH, as the AH draws attention to the seller and the seller can easily be banned/suspended before they receive the AH payment. Lvl6 cubs on AH are almost certainly cubs that were bought by legit players with the intention of flipping for a profit. Maybe those legit players had reason to suspect the cubs, or maybe they didn't.

Why wouldn't legit level 1 bankalts who are reselling those cubs on the AH also draw suspicion and get banned?

[Poofah]

Because selling a tiger cub is not suspicious or bannable by itself. A legit lvl1 bankalt has probably existed for more than a few days, probably doesn't spam trade chat, probably has a north american IP on a north american server, probably doesn't have multiple copies of lvl6 cubs on hand, probably doesn't continually send its gold to a secondary account, probably can converse convincingly with a GM if contacted, etc. I don't know exactly how they police goldsellers, and they're not going to tell us, but they certainly have a process to decide if an account's going to get banned.

[Kpb321]

I don't think we as outside observers can be 100% sure about what is happening. Just because the seller tells us a story that matches what we think is happening doesn't mean that it is actually the truth and we don't have access to nearly enough information to tell what is happening.

With that said I do think that there is something going on and blizzards explanation of it's from compromised accounts doesn't seem to fit. If they were from compromised accounts there are a lot of questions that don't really have logical answers.
Why are they all level 6? Level 1 or 25 would be easy to see but level 6 is odd. Sure I've seen plenty of pets that have been leveled up a little bit so they show up sooner in the AH but why are they all level 6?

Why are there so many of them all of a sudden? How could they have hacked that many legitimate owners all around the same time and why isn't a single one of those pet owners posting here about getting hacked and loosing their valuable pet?

It's possible that someone found a weakness in the codes blizzard generated for the cards and how they validated them allowing them to create unlimited codes but I don't think that is the case as that leaves two big questions.

1) Why level up all the newly redeemed pets to level 6?
2) Why don't we see anyone selling the codes instead of the pets? would seem to make it even harder to trace back to the seller if they were just selling a code.

IMO the best explanation is that someone has found a way to dupe items. It's the simplest explanation for why there are so many of them available and why all the cubs are level 6. There are still other questions I can only guess at.

Why pets? Valuable tradable items that can be caged and traded. There are other highly valuable tradable things in WOW but you can't cage a mount after you've learned it or after a BoE item has been equipped. A pet on the other hand can always be traded again.

Why the competition? Either there are multiple people duping or the duper is using middle men to do his selling. There are lots of realms and it takes a lot of time and accounts to try to sell on lots of them. Even just the high population realms is a large list. I could easily see someone figuring out the dupe and selling quantities of the pets to gold farmers who then use their gold farming resources to sell pets for gold instead. The tiger was their starting point and they seem to have gotten their hands on a dragon kite and a soul trader now. Just wait. banana's and the other rarer cards will be next.

Ultimately I'm kinda mixed about this because I do think someone is breaking the rules of the game and it is impacting everyone. I do also feel a little bad for people who spent a lot of money or gold on these pets to now see them becoming much more common and less valuable. On the other hand I had enough gold to buy maybe one or two of these pets at best at their old value. Depending on what happens with this I might actually be able to get them all which would be nice.

[Laraven]

lvl 1 "Bank alts" that are left in major cities with AH near by is something a lot of players do. Blizz already admitted to having trouble knowing who was who. Gold sellers have been around for ever, and it seems the new pet dupers are here to stay for now. I'm sure Blizz won't get around to fixing this anytime soon. And it seems anyone buying them is safe from infractions for now.

The new TCG deff has EBay's prices bombing to half of what the cards were worth before. The dupes also are having an impact as we can all see. What does this mean overall? It means that our pets, pet trading, and gold making from pets will be effected for a very long time to come.
Bots effecting gold making for years now. Driving AH prices down, making it very hard for honest players to make gold.

I would like to see, Blizz slow down on giving us so many pets, so quickly. Give us less, but better quality pets. Not the same old reskin a hundred times over. Make is harder but not impossible to obtain, and let us feel the reward. And give us time to relish our new pet before introducing another. Work with TCG and make changes to how lvl 1's work in game. Close out the option to trade until lvl 90 for all I care. We will still have mailboxes. But I'm sure Blizz knows about this issue and what it really is, and has thought of everything already. They just don't seem to care to stop it atm.

[Azrile]

Because ALL of the cubs being sold are level 6, they pretty much have to be duplicated. Not much of any other answer is really understandable. Question is, why are so many different people doing the same thing? If it was one person who hacked the codes or programming, why are so many competing and driving the price down so much? THAT is what doesn't make sense. It's not likely that that many people are buying so many copies off one person to try and turn them around. So does that mean it's a single incompetent organization driving their own prices down, or is the code for duplicating on some hacker website and a lot of them are exploiting it? That in my mind is the question.

It isn´t what you think. There is a very specific reason only that one pet is being duped, and there is a very specific reason why they end up level 6 before they can be duped. There is a process involved, and it is out there. It is not one person doing it.

[Gwenolyn]

We are the majority of wow's pet lover here on this website have any of you EVER been hacked and had you pets stolen? I have no auth and have never been hacked period.

I was hacked in June. They sold what was in my bags and took gold. That was it. I have all the TCG pets. In fact, I have all of the cagable pets. I have a mule with nothing but caged pets in her bags. None of it touched.

Edit: My account was banned for "selling gold". It happened while I was on line saying "oh noes, what the heck happened". I may have logged in legit while the hacker was still on because I'm not sure he had finished (maybe he would have got to the pet journal evntually??) I was booted from the server because my account was banned. However, Blizz was pretty speedy banning my account, and also very speedy recovering it for me. They knew pretty quick that the account was compromised.

Do you think BMAH has anything to do with it? Those items don't have an in game code to redeem. Could they be more easily duped than one that came from a code? Or once learned/caged would they be identical? Or to say it another way, if I cage my dragon kite, can Blizz tell if I bought it on BMAH or redeemed a code? Just a thought for you that are smarter about computers than I.

[Imeagle]

That price isn't zero, because it costs them time/money to make new seller accounts as the old ones get banned. But the price floor isn't very high either, as we saw with Deathchargers and epic gems.

I talked with one of these guys last week, asking him to sell cubs on my home server and he told me that the price "was bad". At the time I thought he meant he couldn't make enough profit to make selling there worth it but now I think he meant the gold re-sell price was to bad to make it worth while selling them there.

[Azrile]

Just use Google, you can easily find exactly how they are duping the spectral cub.

They are fighting with the pet in a certain way. It causes the spectral cub to become bugged in their list... and then they are able to cage the pet without it being removed from their pet list. I am not going to say what causes the pet to become bugged, but that is what happens. They are able to cage the pet after a certain pet battle, and the pet remains on their list, and they can just keep caging it over and over again and it apparently does not ´fix itself´ on their list until they log out. The pet has to be level 1 to initiate the bug, so once they log out with the level 6 pet, they can no longer dupe the pet. They have to start over with a different level 1 spectral cub.

That is what I read, and it made perfect sense to me. The reason the pet becomes bug ( is particular to this pet) and also the reason all the duped pets are lvl 6 (because they have to go through that one particular fight to be bugged).

What bugs me about this whole mess is that it literally takes 5 mins on Google to learn how to do it, yet Blizz keeps denying it is happening.

EDIT - just to add, I have never done this, I never tested it, or nothing. I bought my spectral cub above lvl 6 from the AH. Last time when the dupe happened with the mount, I did not even know about it, never bought the mount, still don´t have it.. but this time, I heard about it and researched it just to make sure I was safe buying the cub from the AH.

[Morfraen]

Tons of people selling ethereal soul traders today for as low as 150k...