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Player Substitution Scams “Spot Piling” in No Movement Duels

There are some clever scammers who will try to cheat you out of your money at the Duel Arena not by directly tricking you into a fight you will lose, but by pretending to be friendly or generous and then deceiving you once you've let your guard down. While this is much less common than “conventional” confidence scams, which are usually done in crowded areas like banks, this is still something you need to watch out for.

One example is the Duel Arena equivalent of the “trust game”. A scammer may try to convince you that he's going to give a prize to whoever stakes him the most money, for example. The others in on the game will usually be shills (friends of the scammer) and you'll get taken.

Another gimmick is for someone to stake you and deliberately lose—sometimes more than once. Usually this is for a relatively small amount of money. Once the scammer has convinced you that you can beat him at will, he'll raise the stake much higher so you think you're going to get a big score. Then he'll put on expensive equipment or change tactics, and you'll lose much more than you won in the first few duels.

Scammers may trick you into staking them by appearing to be weak and stupid in terms of combat level and equipment. They will have friends who tell you that the guy's “really dumb and easy to beat”.

One particularly sneaky scam that I read about involves a scammer at the Duel Arena who says he only wants to duel for fun, but that it's more “interesting” if a stake is involved. So he'll start out by just giving you a bunch of money to stake against him. Wow, must be honest to just give you gold with no strings attached, right? Well, not quite. He is hoping you'll start staking him with your “free money”, and when you lose, keep going trying to win it back, eventually losing more than he gave you in the first place.

With these and all similar con games, you must be alert and use common sense. Any time you seem to be taking advantage of someone who is a lot weaker than you are, it could just be a setup for a royal scamming.

Player Substitution Scams “Spot Piling” in No Movement Duels