Gold spammers at it again

Last week reader Jay sent me a screen shot of something I hadn't seen in a while – a gold seller using /tell to spread their wares. For a long time Blizzard has maintained this is illegal activity, and has taken substantial steps to negate the spammers ability to do this. In game spam protection done behind the scenes has been working well. However it looks like the gold spammers have found a way around this.

Initially I was pretty surprised to see the screen shot. After all, this hadn't been happening much. However a couple of days after getting this, I found some gold spam in my chat log as well. I was floored. Now they're back to their old tricks, and even some new ones.

There are some tools out there to help block this. My favorite is WoW Instant Messenger, which has some built in spam protection. However this has caused a few friends that have created level one alts to get a hold of me on another server some issues. Another one that I've used before, and some friends of mine still use, is SpamMeNot. This tool uses key word searches (ie: gold, $10, free, .com) to determine if the incoming message is spam, and blocks it based on that.

Have you been noticing gold spam pop up again lately? Share your tales!