Can blizzard get into legal trouble for frauds/scams on the Diablo market?

[Costia]

So far all of the trading was with in game items. IIRC even in eve only CCP is allowed to trade items for real money.
IF you can buy in-game items with real money, so cases might get to court instead of a GM.
Can blizzard itself get in trouble as well for not preventing some of the scams?
I guess if there is going to be a bug in the auction system they might get screwed.

 

[Elamdri]

I'm not really sure how one might go about perpetrating a fraud or scam on the AH since it's controlled by Blizzard.

 

[Costia]

I'm not really sure how one might go about perpetrating a fraud or scam on the AH since it's controlled by Blizzard.

The same way they do it in eve.
There are some UI issues in EVE that sometimes make it easy to confuse prices with extra zeros, item quantities/names etc. CCP's stand on this - it's your problem.
But when kids are going to play with real money on the market, a court might not see it as the user's problem. Look at the smurf berries case against apple's in game buying...

 

[Elamdri]

I'm not really sure how one might go about perpetrating a fraud or scam on the AH since it's controlled by Blizzard.

The same way they do it in eve.
There are some UI issues in EVE that sometimes make it easy to confuse prices with extra zeros, item quantities/names etc. CCP's stand on this - it's your problem.
But when kids are going to play with real money on the market, a court might not see it as the user's problem. Look at the smurf berries case against apple's in game buying...

I mean, for just general confusion, you have the old adage, Caveat Emptor.

If there is a legitimate issue with the UI, such as someone being able to make a price smaller than it is, or whatever, I dunno, I'm assuming the following would happen.

You call Blizzard, you tell them a scam has happened, and Blizzard refunds your money.

If they say, "No screw you":

1st, you really need a large amount of money at stake here. I think the limit of the RMAH is 250 bucks or something like that. You are likely not going to find a lot of transactions where the amount lost is enough to merit pursing legal action.
2nd, I'm sure that there are terms in the user agreement that limit or exculpate Blizzard from responsibility.
3rd, Once you get around those, they probably will say you have to go into arbitration

After all that, I mean, yeah, maybe you will go to court, but again, it's cheaper for Blizzard to just refund you.

 

[PrinceOfShapeir]

There's a direct ISK to USD exchange rate, y'know, Costia.

 

[Elamdri]

I'm not really sure how one might go about perpetrating a fraud or scam on the AH since it's controlled by Blizzard.

The same way they do it in eve.
There are some UI issues in EVE that sometimes make it easy to confuse prices with extra zeros, item quantities/names etc. CCP's stand on this - it's your problem.
But when kids are going to play with real money on the market, a court might not see it as the user's problem. Look at the smurf berries case against apple's in game buying...

Also, the Smurf-Berries issue in that case wasn't really about Fraud but the easy by which children were able to purchase items in the game.

I don't really see Diablo 3 having that same problem because the game draws from your Battle.net account. No money on that account, no using the RMAH.

 

[Costia]

There's a direct ISK to USD exchange rate, y'know, Costia.

the ISK -> usd exchange is run by CCP? i thought it would be against the tos

 

[Baldr]

First off the real money auction house doesn't use real money :O
You have to buy Blizzard B.Net credit to use it. Since the limit is $250 and small claims court fees are something like $100, most of the time it is not going to be worth the hassle.
Blizzard is covered by legalese that if your not going to read it, it is not their fault.

 

[chimeracreator]

Nope Blizzard is pretty much in the clear on this. A far greater for them is that it could be used for money laundering.

 

[veloper]

In Diablo 3 Blizzard scams and sues YOU!

No seriously, what are you going to do? Go to court over a $10 virtual sword you didn't receive?
The best chance you get is make alot of fuss over it on social media, but even that might not work and depends on the news you're competing with at the moment.

 

[WoW Killer]

Nope Blizzard is pretty much in the clear on this. A far greater for them is that it could be used for money laundering.

It's all electronic transactions though. You can't buy RMAH items with cash. You'd have to deposit the money first, in which case the onus is on the bank to carry out the relevant checks. Even then, Blizzard are taking a 30% cut (you can get about 97% returns in a bookies by comparison), and it leaves a clear audit trail. I can't really see any issues here.

 

[babinro]

So far all of the trading was with in game items. IIRC even in eve only CCP is allowed to trade items for real money.
IF you can buy in-game items with real money, so cases might get to court instead of a GM.
Can blizzard itself get in trouble as well for not preventing some of the scams?
I guess if there is going to be a bug in the auction system they might get screwed.

We'll find out.

Without question someone will take them to court over this. It's just the world we live in.

Not knowing the laws behind it, I severely doubt Blizzard would ever be held responsible because of the very clear lack of responsibility laid out in the Terms of Service for auction house use.

 

[ablac]

They probably have a clause in the contract yuo have to sign that takes away their responsibility for the legitimacy of transactions.

 

[Ranorak]

As for Blizzard's part, they do promote the Authenticator a lot.
10 euro's for the plastic device, free app for phones that support it.
It will not make your account 100% save, nothing will, but it's a bigger hurdle.

As for actual scams on the AH, Blizzard has shown to really help their costumers when being the victim of hacks and keyloggers in WoW. Refunding all lost items and gold. And while these are just virtual items, I'm not really doubting they won't do whatever they can to help a scam victim.
After all, that's great PR.