Game of War Scam : The Journey to Find a Thief

In today’s post I will explain my story of how I was scammed out of my GOW account and how I identified the person who stole it. Spotting a scam was way harder than I had thought and I wish hadn't try to sell my account to someone I don't know.

This all started on October 11^th when I got a random message about someone wanting to buy my main account. The offer was pretty good and I decided that maybe it was time to sell it and become a trap account. The guy wanted to use Playertrade.net and use the middle man service. I was reluctant at first but decided to give it a try unfortunately. The buyer contacted me and then the middle man showed up. Midway through the transaction after the “middleman” had secured the account, I didn’t hear back from the seller and the buyer. The buyer then mentioned that the Y in PlayerTrade was a different font, which is hard to tell on my phone, and then both the buyer and the middleman logged off. However, not without telling me, “Thanks for the account”.

After that it didn’t take long to see the scammer post my account for sale.

So what was I supposed to do?

I decided to contact him and get my account back. I set up the trade again with him and he of course wanted to use Playertrade again.

(Notice it says it’s translated from Norway, this will come in handy later on)

However, this time we go to do the trade on Playertrade.net he uses the real middleman site administrator, the guy he was impersonating less than 24 hours before. The conversation with the REAL middleman started off the same along with the email to send the money to.

At this point I message the real site admin and tell him that my account was stolen. This however proved to not be useful even when I showed the real site admin the screenshots of the conversation and him admitting he stole it. The Playertrade.net Admin also said I could be the scammer and the account could have changed many hands (Even though it had been around 15 hours since it was stolen).

Basically he told me that Playertrade doesn’t have any power to do anything even though Playertrade.net could have just given me my account back since they had the login information. But now I had at least a clue with the paypal email. After searching the web with the email I came up dry until this morning when he posted on PlayerAuctions.com.

Now I had two clues, his email and a new username: Mavo93

So I decided to type into Google Mavo93 at various email providers until I saw this:

I look at the email on reddit and notice that his Paypal email [email protected] and his reddit one [email protected]  were almost identical. Now that I had my next clue I searched Google some more with my new email.

It looks like this wasn’t the first time he scammed someone and after looking at various websites he scams across many games.

I still needed to find the guy behind the username and email however. I searched through more forums until I arrived at this forum posted all the way back in 2012.

Notice the same username: Mavo and the same email: [email protected].

So I clicked on his profile and recent posts and came across his Skype ID: Gamervollen

So then I just downloaded Skype and entered in the ID and bingo!

Notice from earlier when I said his translation was from Norway. This was my first check before I go out and accuse some guy. I then decided to check his other social media sites and found him on Facebook.

I blacked out other people that aren’t relevant. I messaged the guy, Magnus Vollen in Norway prior to this being posted and told him that if I didn’t receive my account back this would be posted. He gave me the run around that he wasn’t the owner that took my account and had traded his COC account for my account. I would have believed him if he didn’t make that post this morning selling my account on Playerauctions and keeps posting the same sell message in the Game of War selling room (which could be an entire scam in and of itself).

Be aware when selling your game account for guys like this! Don't fall for this Game of War scam!

Account Selling article contributed by Prince Todd