RMT: Time to start banning IP addresses

[EllemEnopee]

It's nice to see the news on the launcher about how you folks at Square Enix are taking action against accounts involved in RMT and that the action you are taking is banning them. The problem is that, particularly of late, the are more and more RMT spammers in the game. Some, like gkplayer.com, are changing the character they spam with as often as every 15 minutes.

If this keeps up, we won't have the time to delete old names from our Blacklists to make room for the new ones.

Clearly, your strategy of banning accounts is a failure, despite your intentions. I'm not going to take the cynical stance of suggesting that you're making good money off RMT traders whose accounts you ban over and over. If this game has 1.8 million subs, then the revenue generated for you by RMT accounts is minimal.

The only way you're going to make any headway is to start banning the IP addresses of those banned accounts, the same addresses that are being used over and over by these nuisances.

[Shirai]

I guess you never heard of IP address spoofing

[Ooshima]

I guess you never heard of IP address spoofing

+1

And not everyone has a static IP. There are a lot of ISPs issuing dynamic IPs to residential address users.

[Shneibel]

+1

And not everyone has a static IP. There are a lot of ISPs issuing dynamic IPs to residential address users.

yes yes and dynamic IP is common now a day from ISP, you can get it for free now and include in the pack

[wicked-one]

+1
And not everyone has a static IP. There are a lot of ISPs issuing dynamic IPs to residential address users.

-1 For that Spoofing... that won´t work ^^

ok, it would work, but is not a efficient approach on that ^^

[EllemEnopee]

I guess you never heard of IP address spoofing

Sure I have. Maybe you should have read down to the part of that article that talks about neutralizing IP spoofers. If Square Enix is pulling in north of $25 million/month from OUR subscription fees, they can easily out-spend whatever any gold-seller business would be able to counter them with. On top of that, it's the sort of network security work Square Enix should be doing to protect our account information from the sort of disaster that happened to Sony Online Entertainment had a few years back when their system got hacked and 77 million people had their account data stolen. Given the amount of subterfuge any serious cyber-criminals would take in hiding where they would be attacking from, what any RMT companies could do would probably look negligible.

[Shirai]

what any RMT companies could do would probably look negligible.

You are severely underestimating what these guys are capable of.
This isn't a bunch of amateurs that is out to make a statement or make a little extra pocket money.

This is their living, their daily bread and they will do anything to keep their business going.
These guys are capable of programming bots to perform certain actions in this game, they are able to make a program that sends tells to thoudsands of online players, multiple times in a matter of minutes.
And you don't think them capable of doing something as simple as masking their IP addresses?

[Kunihiro]

You are severely underestimating what these guys are capable of.
This isn't a bunch of amateurs that is out to make a statement or make a little extra pocket money.

This is their living, their daily bread and they will do anything to keep their business going.
These guys are capable of programming bots to perform certain actions in this game, they are able to make a program that sends tells to thoudsands of online players, multiple times in a matter of minutes.
And you don't think them capable of doing something as simple as masking their IP addresses?

No I don't think they're capable. It doesn't take much skill to make a bot.

[Shirai]

No I don't think they're capable. It doesn't take much skill to make a bot.

And it takes even less skill to mask or spoof an IP address.

[ReiszRie]

No I don't think they're capable. It doesn't take much skill to make a bot.

Well, then you are certainly underestimating them.