Newest Gold Spammer Antics in Wrath

This past weekend, I spent an evening running Steamvaults with my wife and a couple other friends. I was on my Shaman, so I was healing the run. Out of nowhere, I get a message from a level 1 toon. WIM initially blocks tells from level 1's, but I was curious as to who it was and what they said since the name was something that sounded legit.

In the message, I was asked if I wanted to trade my shaman for a 70 rogue with S1/S2 and T4/T5 gear.

Well gee... I thought the gold spammers were bad, but now this? He didn't even validate the tell (as WIM requests you to do if you're a level 1 toon).

Let me first say that this is totally against the EULA. You cannot trade accounts.

But it got me thinking about their marketing strategy. The Gold Spammer of old at least had a product that appeals to everyone. Even if you don't want to buy it with real money, everyone in the game has a need for money. Some might have enough where they don't need any more, but they still need to have some.

If you're targeting specific classes, you've just dropped your supply by a great deal. Over-simplifying the numbers, you are now only dealing with about 1/9th of the population. And you're making a pretty big assumption that that's the only level 70 that that account has. And you have to find somebody that isn't happy with their class and now wants a rogue (in this case). Wow... Talk about a market niche.

Now, far be it from me to tell somebody how to do marketing for their business. Maybe it was some random kid sending out a ton of whispers. (But again... I would think they would have validated the WIM message so it would get through to me?) It would certainly seem that if you were advertising your web site or service of trading toons, you'd want to do so to a much bigger audience. Who knows? Maybe spell out your web site name in IF using dead gnomes. Oh wait... the Gold Spammers already did that.

Then again... maybe this was just some random person looking for a shaman to trade for.