Rocket League Trading Scams: How to Avoid Them?
Rocket League is one of the world’s most popular online games, and it gives players a large degree of freedom in modifying their vehicle to fit their personal aesthetic. This is thanks to all the different cosmetic items, which the players can use to change the looks of their cars. Players can change wheels, decals, and even entire car bodies to create their unique, perfect look.
There are many different cosmetic items available to players, and some of them, like the titanium white Octane can be worth a very large amount of money. Because of this, Rocket League trading is a very serious part of the game, and many players use it to make some real cash.
However, because there’s so much money in Rocket League trading, the game also sadly includes quite a lot of Rocket League scams. If you want to trade and not lose your precious time and money, you’ll need to learn how to avoid Rocket League trading scams. Here is a quick guide on how to do it and what tactics scammers use to steal your items and/or money.
What Are Rocket League Trading Scams?
If you have been playing Rocket League for some time now, chances are you have some expensive items in your Rocket League garage. Because some of the most expensive Rocket League items can be worth well over one thousand dollars, scamming others for their Rocket League items is a great, although criminal, source of money. Many potential thieves are looking out for users who don’t know what the popular scam methods are in order to take their items and later sell them for easy money.
Scammers today have very intricate methods of stealing items from other players. Many scammers utilize multiple people to steal items from others, often adding fake positive reviews to their profiles, or creating fake discord servers filled with bots or other scammers. While most users won’t bother scamming others for lower-value items like the cheapest Rocket League decals or wheels, you should always double-check if you’re thinking of trading a certain item which often trades for large sums of money. Scammers are often on the lookout for other players looking to trade the most expensive Rocket League items, and chances are that if you’re selling something that’s worth quite a lot of money, you’ll be contacted by one or two PC players who are actually looking to scam you.
Most Popular Rocket League Trading Scams
If you’re looking to trade Rocket League items, you should first learn what potential dangers scammers pose to you. Here are some of the most common methods that scammers use to steal from you.
Discord Scams
Discord is one of the most popular platforms for communicating in-game. The app offers its users easy-to-host free servers, with a multitude of useful features that they can access without paying. Discord also provides seamless integration with all games and makes it easy to communicate with your friends while playing online.
Because of this, Discord has quickly become a fairly popular platform for all gamers, including those who are looking to trade Rocket League items. Discord Rocket League trading is a popular method of buying and selling items, and scammers do a lot to take advantage of this popularity. There are two basic techniques, which scammers utilize over Discord: a Scratchy Discord scam and a Discord prize scam.
The first technique, commonly called the Scratchy Discord scam has the scammers build trust from the person they are trying to scam by creating a fake Discord Rocket League community, which can often look perfectly normal and not cause any suspicion. If you engage in Discord trading on a popular, active server with a player who has a lot of good reviews from others, chances are you won’t really see it as a red flag. This scam involves two people, and one of them is a middleman, which the scammer claims is a trusted person (or even a trading bot). Once you trade your items with the middleman, they will simply disappear with your items, without giving you anything in return.
The second scam, the Discord prize scam, is very similar to all other kinds of phishing attacks. Most of the time it involves the attack mass sending messages to other players, claiming that they have won some kind of online competition. In the message, it will say that the only thing players have to do is log in with their Rocket League account on a linked website, and the items will be added to their inventory. Of course, nothing like this will happen, and instead, players will quickly lose all their Rocket League items.
Selling Items for Suspicious Prices
This scam again involves two people in cooperation, or simply a single scammer using two different accounts. Basically, the way this technique works is that one of the scammers offers to sell an item for a certain amount of credits, while the other one will put in an offer that he’s looking to make a purchase for a bigger price.
Now the way this supposedly works is that a player who’s unaware will naturally see this as a good way to make some quick money and purchase the item in order to sell it to another player for an attractive price. However, as soon as he buys the item, the other player will simply withdraw his buy offer. This way the scammers offload an item that’s often quite cheap for a significant amount of credits, and the player scammed is left with the item, often having done a very poor deal.
Item Swap Scam
The item swap scam is possibly one of the most simple and basic scamming techniques that scammers use, yet many players very often keep falling for it. Not only do the noobies end up falling for it, but an experienced trader can also easily lose their items this way.
When you’re trading with another player, they might try and do something to distract you from the trade box by asking you questions, particularly those, that require you to alt-tab out of the game. When you’re not paying attention, the other player will quickly switch the items they want to trade for another one, that very often looks similar. If you don’t pay attention and end up accepting the trade, you will find yourself without the items you wanted, and no way to get your stuff back.
Duplicate Items Scam
In the past, there was a very infamous bug in Rocket League trading, which allowed players to duplicate items, and these duped items were perfectly tradable. The only downside? Once you reset your game the items which were duplicated simply disappear. This was a particularly good technique for scamming others since you wouldn’t know that you traded for duped items until you reset your game, which can be easily an hour or two after you complete the trade.
While item duplication was patched a long time ago, this doesn’t mean that the players aren’t looking to take advantage of this method. In particular, there are scammers who will offer other players that they can illicitly duplicate their items, essentially giving them free stuff. Of course, they will first require the other player to trade them the items they wished to have duplicated. Once the other player trades the items over, the other player who claims that they can duplicate the items simply disappears, without giving anything back in return.
In Conclusion
When you’re trading expensive Rocket League items, there is a lot of money on the line, and there’s a chance that someone will try to scam you or something will go wrong. If you want to avoid Rocket League scams, be sure to check out RLexchange!
