Neopets: The Scams, Hacks, Cheats & Darkside of Neopia
Oct 13 '04 (Updated May 27 '06)
The Bottom Line ... trust no one ...
In my previous Neopet primers I mentioned some of the scams that take place at the site but there are few that I failed to mention or just didn’t go into enough detail about. I got a lot of emails and feedback about my previous editorials so I decided to write one up about the murky underbelly of the site – hopefully to clear up some common misconceptions and answer some of the questions that were asked of me. The title of this primer might lead you to think that this is about Sloth’s invasion or glitches – those are threats but for now, I’m talking about the scammers, hackers and cheaters that seem to be in abundance these days. You can find them in guilds, posting on message boards, in the Trading Post or just combing the Money Tree to see who donates items of value. They are there, just waiting for you to let your guard down, waiting for make one small mistake so they can rob you blind.
One of the biggest, and potentially most dangerous-to-your-account, scams is “pet sitting”. This is where you pay someone to go into your account, feed you pet, play with them and ensure that they are happy. Some people will even offer to do the daily events for you as well. While some people are on the up and up about this and do a good job – most of the people offering are in it to get into your account, change the password and milk it for all it’s worth. If you give someone your password you are essentially giving them the keys to the kingdom and there isn’t a thing Neopets will do about it unless you can provide them with a lot of proof that you weren’t suckered into giving out the information. I see it all the time, people on the message boards asking for someone to petsit for them only to see them come back a week or so later with another account saying that so-and-so cleaned out their account, took their NP and abandoned their pets in the pound. And sadly, no matter how many times you warn people, they still do it. That is why the NeoLodge is in effect, for people who are going on vacation or won’t be able to get to the site – put your pet in there and they will be taken care of without having to worry about someone killing your account. Most of the time when someone gets a hold of your account in this manner they will sell off your inventory for a low price and transfer the NP to another account or have others buy the items dirt cheap and “share the wealth”. This might sound like a good plan but eventually Neopets catches on to it and, just like in real life, you could get busted for buying “stolen property”. TNT, the Neopets team, can look at your account activity to see if you are swapping items with someone to determine if you are part of the scam. Bottom line, if you have an aged account it’s just not worth it to risk it for some cheap items.
If you are ever asked to do a trade outside the Trading Post, no matter how attractive it is, don’t do it. 95% of the time you are going to get suckered for your items and TNT won’t be able to help you. This happens a lot with items that can be used to get avatars; people will ask to borrow something and if you just flat out send it to them without collateral, chances are you won’t get it back. If you do your trades through the Trading Post you have something of their to hold on to in case the disappear. Live auctions are a common occurrence on the Shop Ad board but they are against the rules of the site. Why? Outside of being off topic and hogging up board space most of the time they result in someone getting taken. It usually unfolds like this – someone posts that they have a petpet for 1NP – but when you get to the thread it’s the opening bid and others start to chime in. After everyone has their bids and counter bids in, the seller says “Ok, I will put something in my shop for [whatever amount] and when you buy it, I will send you the [item you are bidding on]”. Now, most people will stop and say, why not just put the item in your shop for that price… they are slick and will say “because that is a lot less than its worth and someone else will get it before you do”. You are all jacked up that you won the bid so you throw caution to the wind and go to the shop and buy the item … then you sit and wait for the person to send you the item and most of the time it never happens.
On a side note, the other Trading Post scam relies on user error and technically there is nothing that TNT can do about it. Let’s say you put a treasure map piece up for auction and are asking 50,000 NP for it. You will get a ton of offers since these pieces are highly sought after and in high demand. Ever notice that when you post an item on the Trading Post you get junk offers from aged accounts? Someone that offers you useless junk that isn’t worth more than a few hundred neopoints? They aren’t just blindly bidding or thinking that their items are rare – they are hoping that you will click the wrong button and accept the trade rather than reject it. If you aren’t a member of the site or haven’t used the Trading Post to sell items that might sound like a silly statement to make – like how can you possibly click the wrong button. Trust me it is easier than you think. Another way they try and trick you is to bid items that have sidebar comments – like that it is a rare item, special item or retired. These are the words that appear to the right of the item listing that offer you more information about an item. If a newbie gets a random event and is given a piece of a map and places it in the Trading Post, someone can offer them “rare” items like berries, books etc – all of which come no where near equaling what the map piece is worth. The newbie sees that the items are retired or rare and accepts the bid thinking they are making out in the deal. It’s only when they get the items, look it up and price it in their shop that they realize they were ripped off. Technically there’s nothing TNT ca do about it since you accepted the trade – but trust me, that person will carry that lesson with them for a long, long time.
Another very popular scam is the “buy one, get one free” or “buy this and get a free gift” – both of which are against the rules of the site. Most of the time the boy one get on free scam involves buying something that is overpriced like a petpet; buy one and the person will send you another one free. Humm, why not just even out the price and sell them both in your shop? The second one is a little trickier. This one usually involves two or three people working the boards – they post that if you buy something from their shop [usually cheap berries for 1,000 – 5,000 NP] they will send you something in return. To eliminate the naysayers and skeptics, someone will say “Thanks for the gift, they sent me a codestone!”. This is a scam, 100% pure and simple. They say that they need to charge 1,000 NP so the transaction will show up in their sales history but in reality it’s just to try and get the most from you before they get frozen. These scams are often run on stolen accounts or ones that have been aged – scammers usually have a ton of accounts so when you look at the user lookup you think, “well, they have been here a while and have a bunch of avatars so they aren’t going to scam me”. Think again, there are at least 15 avatars that you can get in a matter of minutes – by visiting pet pages, playing games or as random events when you visit a certain part of the site. Putting your trust in someone because they have a fancy look up page, a painted pet, a ton of avatars or an aged account is nothing more than asking to get ripped off.
There is a huge difference between getting scammed and getting hacked. According to Neopets there has never been a successful hack into the site – but they don’t say whether or not that covers user accounts or the site as a whole. If you pick a password that is easy to guess – chances are someone can sit there and try to get in over a period of time. This is one of the main reasons to be leery of random Neofriend requests or someone that really wants to strike up a conversation with you. You have remember this – the site has a lot of kids that use it. What do kids usually pick as their passwords? Pet names, their boyfriend or girlfriends name, favorite music group, stuffed animal etc. – things that someone can easily get out of them during a conversation. It seems like a complete waste of time to me to sit there and screw with people to get their password or information that can be used to get in to their account but it happens all the time. This is yet another reason why you should never give your email address to anyone at the site – if they have this information they can hack into that, go to the site, fill out the form to say that they forgot their password and have a new one sent to the email address that is on file. Then it’s all a matter of getting the new password, getting into the account and cleaning it out.
Change your password often and make it something that is hard to crack. If you have given your email address to someone and get a funny feeling about it, change the password to your email account as well and make sure that you don’t use the same password for both of them. Another way people can get into your account is to promise to get you an avatar. Give them your password, they will go in, get the score needed to get the avatar then let you know when to log back in. Of course this gives them plenty of time to clean out your account, transfer NP and exploited it for all it’s worth. And please, don’t believe the line that only one person can be logged in to an account at a time. I was foolish enough to give someone my password to my account wile I was still logged in to it and they had no problem gaining access.
This brings us to the outside sites that scam. Sometimes you will see these posted on the message boards, another reason why links to outside sites are not permitted. Some sites have cookie grabber programs that will steal your password, others offer you rare items or NP in exchange for doing a survey. To get the item or NP you have to give them your log in information and allow them a set amount of time to deposit the item or funds. Of course this is a scam – they want the time to get in, change the password and lock you out of the account. Some scammers are straightforward and say “Go to this site to get a million points and twenty paintbrushes”, once you get there you could have your information lifted or simply be asked for your user information so they can transfer the items – that should set of a bell right there. All they need is your user name and they can send you things – that is unless you block this option in your user preferences. One recent scam was posted by a newbie account, a female newbie account. She said “if you want to see my picture, go to my user look up and cut and paste the address in your browser”. The result – a lot of guys hit that then came back an hour later saying their account was hacked or someone attempted to get into their account.
Anyone that offers you secrets or information about Neopets isn’t just breaking the rules, they are looking for newbies and suckers. This usually happens in the message boards with someone offering some juicy tidbit in exchange for rare items or NP. Most of the time they will say “I will tell you where the Hidden Tower is if you give me a codestone”. Another one is the location of Jelly World or codes that you can use to get extra time on games, times that you can get doubloons from The Shrine etc. All this information can be accessed for free from any number of outside sites that are on the up and up and 100% legitimate. Several people have adverts in their user lookup saying they know the secret to making thousands of NP a day and if you send them a bottled faerie, codestone or rare item they will tell you the secret. Again, this is against the rules of the site so if you come across this, please report it to TNT [the Neopets team]. The biggest “secret” they offer you is almost identical to the real world MLM, multi level marketing scam. You send them the item they want and they send you a Neomail saying “If you want to make thousands of neopoints a day, cut and paste my advertisement and put it in your lookup, then people will send you items and you tell them to do the same thing”. A variation on this is that they will send you a cut and paste of the information that can be found at other sites. If you have ever sat there and tried to time the doubloon restock [55 seconds past the minute] at the shrine you know it is a hit or miss thing – sometimes you get it, other times you don’t. It’s just another way scammers try to sucker people and it never pays to buy into their line of bull.
Thing that’s it? Guess again. There are more ways to get scammed at the site, a lot more. When you join the site you agree to the rules, terms and conditions. One of them being that the pets and accounts at the site are not for sale, can’t be transferred and can’t be traded. This means that someone who is advertising that they are selling their account is probably scamming somewhere along the way. Look at it like this – if you are leaving the site why would you sell your account? If you don’t plan on coming back, how will you use the NP or items you get for it? This is something that people never stop to think about. The scammers will respond and say “I am giving the NP to my friend” or “I am giving the items to my sister that just started and doesn’t have anything”. Um, if that’s the case then just send her the items you have. Adverting to sell an account or offering to buy one is a sure fired way to get your account frozen. If you are on the thread making an offer, TNT might just freeze you, even more so if someone posts that it is against the rules and you continue bidding.
Selling pets is something that seems to come and go; it usually accelerates when limited edition pets are released or there is an avatar involved. You can’t sell a pet, you can’t put a pet in your shop nor can you promise to put it in the pound and reserve it for someone else to adopt. Once a pet is placed in the pound it is up for grabs and the first person that gets it and pays the adoption fee is the new owner. Anyone that promises you a pet or says they will sell it to you / give it to you if you buy some overpriced item from their shop is scamming. Petpets and petpetpets can be sold in your shop, put in the Trading Post, up for auction or donated to The Money Tree but pets can not so do not believe the people that try to say that they can be. While I am on the topic of selling things, you can’t offer to make banners, user look ups, designs, guild lay outs or anything else at the site in exchange for NP or items. Like most of the other illegal activities, this usually surfaces on the message boards. People will offer to make look up pages etc for NP and there is always someone that’s willing to pay to have a more attractive page. You can go to a lot of sites and get premade look ups or you can get a premade one and change it to your liking. This runs hand in hand with the email scam – because they will need an email address to send the code to and usually people will give them their main email address, one that is usually tied in to your Neopet account.
There’s one thing the site is never short of and that’s the beggars. They can be found all over the place and most of the time they are nothing more than scammers. If you donate heavily to The Money Tree people will Neomail you and ask you to send them stuff, that’s happened to me on more than one occasion. Most of the time you can find at least one or two people on the message boards begging for free stuff claiming that their account was hacked when in reality, if someone hacks your account or gets control of it, the first thing they are going to do it change the password – and in that case – how would you get back into it to post the message saying that you were hacked? This has recently elevated to people saying that their account was being held hostage by someone and if they paid them a certain amount of NP or sent them rare items they would give them back their account. Again, this is a scam. If someone gets into your account, contact TNT and tell them, give them as much information as possible and let them deal with it. If you know the person that has your log in information then why not just contact TNT and have them get the account back for you? Sit down and think about this stuff before you buy into it.
That’s not to say that people haven’t been scammed or hacked – and most of the time it’s someone that they trusted, a best friend, boyfriend or girlfriend etc. It’s amazing how many relationships are ruined when one person steals items from someone’s account or pirates their friends account and robs them blind. This happened to me recently with my Faerie Queen Doll [that cost me 2 million noepoints to purchase]. Someone that I trusted, was in a guild with and considered to be one of the most honest people at the site turned out to be nothing more than a hard core scammer. He had a lot of people fooled because he had an 18 month account [turns out it was one of seventeen accounts he had], reported people for abusing the site, was the owner of a guild and had impressive battledome experience. Then, one fateful day, someone in the guild gave him their password and greed took over. He cleaned out this persons account, changed the password and transferred the items to another account – an account that was also frozen. He gave me the song and dance about how he was unfairly frozen blah blah blah and I believed him. It later comes to pass that he was playing a lot of people at the site, females of course, and had been doing so for a long time. The long and short of it is this – I never got my Faerie Queen Doll back; I had sent it to him for “safe keeping” and more likely than not, he transferred it to another account then to another then to another – or he could have just sold it and kept the NP in yet another account. That’s a great example of why you shouldn’t trust anyone – not with your password, your rare items or your email address. On a side note, this person is a member of Epinions and I know he’ll be reading this editorial but I won’t give him the satisfaction of mentioning his name. All I have to say is this – if someone does this to someone at a kids gaming site, imagine how truly pathetic they must be in real life.
So, we have covered a lot of ground in regards to scams, hacks, cheats and people who are at the site to exploit others. When you stop to think about it, it’s kind of funny. It is a free site, it doesn’t cost anything to join or play, but people insist on ruining it for others. These aren’t real life items, you can’t cash in your points for money and outside of winning trophies or getting published in the Neopian Times, there’s no real recognition to be had from it. Common sense usually flies out the window when you are new at the site – you see someone selling something that they say is rare and you jump on it. Yeah, it might be listed as rare but try selling a Nutritional Blockberry for 10,000 NP and see how quickly you are laughed at. It’s the thrill of the hunt, trying to find that rare item you can make millions off of – yes, they are out there, but if you think someone is just going to drop it in your lap, you have got another thing coming – and that is getting ripped off.
I used to make fun of the kids at the comic book store that quoted The X Files and said “trust no one” in regards to the Neopet site – after having been taken for a FQD [faerie queen doll] I have to agree with them. If you give someone access to your account, give them your email address or anything else that could compromise your account security – chances are greed will step in and you will be left in the cold. Trust me; if it can happen to me, an extremely paranoid person, it can happen to you!
As always, thanks for the read!
~^V^~ Freak ~^V^~
© 2004 Freak369
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Neopets: The Scams, Hacks, Cheats & Darkside of Neopia
The Dark Side of Neopets: Pant Devil, Dr. Sloth, Boo Brothers, Esophagor & Tax Beast!
The Neopets Primer: Getting Stared On That First Million!
The Neopet Primer II: Making The Second Million!
So You Want To Get Rich At Neopets? Quests, Quests & More Quests!
Spoil Your Neopet! Get Them Their Very Own Petpet!
Want to play the stock market? Check out Mobiprof’s primer here:
How I Became A Stock Market Millionaire
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