RMT Imitating Legit Players with Names

[Symphie]

Why would they impersonate possible customers? This sounds something more like a troll would do instead of a business.

By impersonating people they tarnish said people's reputation by the similarity of a name. People of course take this serious(why wouldn't they?). And I wouldn't be surprised if you tried to contact the RMT person about it w/ the name, they'd tell you they gladly dump it... if you pay for their service. I suppose we could call it a form of blackmailing. Perhaps might not be their intent but believe it or not, I've seen this sort of behavior happen in F2P games. Just not in relation to RMT.

And since there are people who do buy from RMT, I'm sure some would also pay to make this sort of problem go away.

[Astrus]

By impersonating people they tarnish said people's reputation by the similarity of a name. People of course take this serious(why wouldn't they?). And I wouldn't be surprised if you tried to contact the RMT person about it w/ the name, they'd tell you they gladly dump it... if you pay for their service. I suppose we could call it a form of blackmailing. Perhaps might not be their intent but believe it or not, I've seen this sort of behavior happen in F2P games. Just not in relation to RMT.

And since there are people who do buy from RMT, I'm sure some would also pay to make this sort of problem go away.

That's interesting, it's a side I didn't see until now.

What I figured was happening is that SE is doing something behind the scenes that's actually hurting the RMTs so in retaliation they adopted this new behavior to

a) make investigations more annoying for the people following up on reports as now they have to check if the report was for the actual bot or the player it tries to impersonate.

b) hurt the game. It's pretty much inevitable that some people will misspell the bot's name and write the legitimate player's name when filing a report. If any false positives slip through and innocent players have actions taken against their account the people affected will be angry at SE (and rightly so). Fixing those mistakes, once again, takes time and resources.

It's a pretty clever defense mechanism but it can be somewhat countered by giving us an easier way to report RMT bots, that being right-click-reporting.