Hi everyone!

Some of you may have heard about or were affected by a recent cheater who fraudulently acquired a large amount of wealth on Mycena Cave and Kaylune. We have since dealt with the damage created by reversing their individual on-site trades and marketplace purchases, and worked with Kaylune to reverse the cross-site trades that the cheater made.

As you may imagine, cleaning up after cheaters is time-intensive (in this case, over a week of work, many hours a day), unpleasant work for glitch which takes away from time that could be spent doing more productive tasks for Mycena Cave.  It also makes for a number of unhappy players who believed their trades were legitimate.

In addition to making our players aware of the situation, we’d like to refresh everyone on our trading rules!  Always keep your eye out for suspicious trading behavior and report to a moderator if you think something feels “off” — suspicious trading behavior is easy for staff to catch when it takes place on Mycena Cave, but harder with off-site trading because we are only seeing one end of the deal, making it much riskier for the player.

Please keep in mind the relevant trading rules:

• Trades completed entirely through our Trade utility are guaranteed by Mycena Cave
  • If something goes wrong, we’ll fix it
  • If the goods you traded for were illicitly generated and need to be removed, you will be compensated
• Trading by any other means (“gift for a gift”, etc) is done entirely at your own risk
  • If something goes wrong, we may or may not be able to help you
  • If the goods you traded for were illicitly generated and need to be removed, you will not be compensated

• Cross-site trading (trading for goods or services on another website) is allowed, under the following conditions:
  1. The site you are trading with allows cross-site trades
  2. You understand that a cross-site trade is entirely at your own risk (see section 7.2, “trading by any other means”)
  3. You are not trading for anything which can be exchanged for real money
  4. The site you are trading with does not allow you to trade things for real money

You can read the trading rules in full in our rules and guidelines.  These trading rules are expanded on in the trading forum’s stickied post.  Lastly, this stickied post in the off-site trading forum contains a note about avoiding scams:

Hi everyone,

This is just another reminder to exercise caution when performing cross-site trades. Remember that we cannot guarantee trades that occur between sites, because we have no control of the other side. Today marks an unhappy milestone in Mycena Cave history: our very first site-ban, for scamming people in cross-site trades.

In this instance we were lucky: the other website(s) involved were extremely responsive and helpful, rolling back the transaction on their end after we reported the issue to them, so the Mycena Cave user who got stiffed got their stuff back. However, had they been unresponsive or uncooperative (as is entirely within their rights), the user in question would simply have been out of luck.

So, when it comes to cross-site trades, remember to be cautious:
1. Exercise extreme caution if one of the accounts you’re trading with is fairly unestablished (i.e. few forum posts and/or pets, etc).
2. See if you can find a user that you trust who can vouch for whoever you’re trading with.

Remember, a great deal is only great if you actually get what you are promised.

Sincerely,
glitch

In this case, the scammer had set up in Kaylune and was amassing Kaylune goods, so there was no record of players conversing with the scammer on Mycena Cave.  In addition, they sent Mycena currency to players with the anonymous feature, likely so the players wouldn’t know that their account was brand new.  This behavior is a red flag; always verify both sites’ accounts, and be sure to have your agreements recorded via echo on Mycena Cave as well.  In this instance, Kaylune was extremely helpful, but in the event that the other petsite can’t help out, players would have only had the Mycena Cave side of their trade reversed, potentially leaving them with a significant loss.  It is safest if you perform the Mycena Cave portion of your cross-site trades through our Trading utility, with the trade name clearly marked as an off-site trade, and indicating the site you’re trading with.  Avoid agreeing to transfers, especially anonymous ones.

Remember, while we will do our best to protect you, you should also do your best to protect yourselves!  Stay safe out there and happy trading!

Thanks for all the hard work behind the scenes guys!! Squash those cheaters!!!

Also thanks for being transparent about everything! I wasn’t effected but I’m so glad it was all sorted out!

Thank you, glitch, for your diligence in putting everyone to square one and finding the person who cheated.

I know that there is always a hesitation to discuss the Whys or Details of these things, since they would be potentially exploitable by others.  but I would very like assurance that whatever happened is something that can’t be done again (at least, on Mycena’s end.) Even if you can’t give the details as to how someone was able to generate/accumulate that wealth fraudulently, a little more detail about what glitch was able to do to fix it would be appreciated - or if the cheating happened mostly on Kaylune, that’s also useful to know because it means I won’t offsite-trade there until it’s fixed.

Jacq

From what I’m getting it was a user problem, not a site problem, therefore there it no guarantee that it won’t happen again. A Kaylune user was setting up trades and Mycena people, being the trusting lovelies that they are, were throwing trades on Kaylune then accepting anonymous trades on here, though I suppose once the Kaylune trade was accepted, the Kaylune user canceled the Mycena trade. I assume the correspondence was set up so people couldn’t see the problem until it was too late. To fix it it sounds like the usual rolling back of trades and banning the user. Unless they were jumping through site loopholes on either Kaylune or Mycena Cave, it doesn’t sound like a site problem.

To me it sounds like a case of not double-checking on the user’s parts. Gotta be careful ::(

-Sid
If that’s the case then I think I misunderstood the first post. That’s totally fine then. Well, I mean, not FINE, but a regular garden-variety scamming which is crappy but something you can usually avoid with vigilance.
I generally hear “cheater” used to refer to someone who injects code or otherwise manipulates the site/game into doing things it’s not meant to do. (Which is distinct from a scammer, in my parlance).

In the case, I’d like assurance/iteration from someone on staff that this person was a scammer and not a cheater. Or rather, that they were exploiting other users but not either site itself. (As you said, a user issue, not a site issue).

frieza:
Where the rules say “generated” we mean things making their way into a situation. For example, if you scam people in cross-site trades and acquire goods in that way, they are considered fraudulently generated within the context of what you subsequently do with them (even though they came into existence in a normal way).

-Sid Jacq:
It was a bit of both actually.

To your concern, whenever something like this happens we do our best to make sure that it can’t happen again in the same way. For example, a common way of performing credit card fraud is to generate a large list of “potentially valid” credit card details, and to try them one after the other (usually about 2 or 3 out of 100 will work). Fairly recently, somebody did exactly that and bought a large number of gems through fraudulent credit card transactions in this manner, and used them for cross-site trading between Mycena Cave and Flight Rising. We refunded the credit card charges (after all, the cardholder wasn’t the person who was on Mycena Cave) and as a result had to roll back our end of the cross-site trade, but I am given to understand that Flight Rising chose not to roll back their end, which means our Mycena Cave player lost quite a bit of stuff on Flight Rising. Our mitigation for this is that since then, we block your account’s ability to perform credit card charges after a certain number (or percentage) of recent failed attempts.

In this particular instance, the player was illicitly generating wealth on both sites. It’s not my place to say what they were doing on Kaylune, but on Mycena Cave they created three accounts and were using these to fraudulently generate large amounts of nuggets. While I won’t go into detail on how they were doing so on Mycena Cave, I can confirm that what they were doing is similarly no longer possible.

I don’t think you can trade anonymously, pretty sure things sent anonymously are automatically sent to the player with a notification.

Always dislike seeing scammers about & offsite trading is always a risk. I’m a trader myself & have been for years, so I try to exercise caution when I can. I generally have people set up a trade (to show they have the currency) or send it directly to me before I send the offsite currency. Makes people more comfortable to send the currency first when they know that you’ll fix it in the event they are scammed.

Sorry to the parties involved, glad that the sites worked together to resolve the issue.

glitch
Thank you very much for that explanation. I really appreciate it and am glad that the issue was fixed on Mycena’s end. I haven’t seen anything on Kaylune, but I don’t really play that game much so it would be easy to miss (still, I’ll be extra careful about trades thru there).

There’s definitely a tendency to both think “I would never get scammed!” and also that the people that DO get scammed somehow could have prevented it. Maybe so, but it’s really easy to just…want to make a trade so badly. idk. I myself was once the victim of a huge fraud (I paid a “company” a big pile of my professor’s money to do some data processing, and they took it and ran - the charges were reversed at the bank fairly easily but the embarrassment and jaw-dropping realization that I was fleeced is one of the worst feelings in the world).

Anyways, I’m really happy to hear that Mycena was able to patch things up and that hopefully this particular exploit (and the week’s worth of clean-up) won’t happen again :)

Haha this was a BIG (and not a pleasant) surprise. When my item got bought of the market place I didn’t think anything of it since it’d been up for some time and I figured it’d get bought eventually. Never thought to check into the buyer.

I REALLY appreciate you all being so transparent about the issue. I’m reassured by your competence and grace when it came to handling the issue

(even if I was >:/ about those nuggets!!) 

Thanks for posting about this issue.

I haven’t seen it mentioned, so I’d like to add a little thing here. It might not be useful for a lot of people, but if it’s just useful for a single person even, I’m happy.
For people trading with Aywas, Aywas fully covers their end of cross-site trades, so if you trade with aywas, make sure that the aywas end of trades gets handled first!
Here’s their official post about it: http://www.aywas.com/news/view/3326/

You, the user, agree that you will:

• [...]
• not falsify information regarding any sale
• not conduct transactions that involve real world money or any website’s property in which that website forbids trading
• not sell or attempt to sell any product you do not have in your possession at the time for immediate transfer
• [...]

[...]
Users may not sell any accounts, pets, items, currency, or any other property of Aywas for real life money, including but not limited to United States Dollars, Canadian Dollars, Euros, Gift cards (Visa Giftcard, Mastercard, Amazon Gift Card, etc) or real life objects that are not artwork (video games, books, etc).
Aywas Terms of Service

Frid

Since FR gems, like GP, can also be purchased with real-world money, and I haven’t seen Aywas discourage cross-site trading with Flight Rising (on the contrary, Aywas has a thriving cross-site trade subforum dominated by FR), I think we should be okay trading Mycena currencies with Aywas, even GP. ^^

I’d avoid cross-trading with commission panel escrow, which involves real world funds, since that’s a strange gray area, but I think what’s being traded now should be okay.

Frid

If you’re trading Mycena currency for GP that will eventually go toward escrow, but on the Mycena side of things is just a Nuggets/GP (or Gems/GP) trade, I’d say the cross-trade and any cross-site involvement are complete once you and your partner finalize things. What you do with that traded GP afterward is between you and Aywas, since it’s your currency. ^^

Now if you were attempting to directly trade Mycena currency for a USD transaction, that’s where I imagine things would get hairy, since money would be directly involved. I’d perhaps wait until an admin weighed in with an official ruling, but that’s just my take and experience with cross-site trading.

i know this is old news. ;v; I don’t come on MC very often, but I’m super active on kaylune (online most of the day), and i do know quite a bit about this issue. of course it’s from the KL perspective, as i met the offending user there. i suppose you guys can all pm me if you want to know more ;w;
i seriously hope it’s okay to be posting this at this late time… :‘D