How aware was TNT of Neopets cheating websites(where they sell accounts) and what action did they take to protect users and shut these websites down? Any good stories in regards to these cheating websites?
snarkie
Not a robot... probably.
Really interesting question!
We had people dedicated to safety and security and this is one of the things they dealt with. They had a wide range of responsibilities that people don’t really think about, actually! One that always seems to surprise people is suicide watch (with the help of the Monitors). I have seen them literally save real human lives. I am so super proud of them.
But anyway!
Yup, we were very aware of those types of sites! There were a lot of ways this was dealt with, both on the protection/preventative side and in tracking and recovery. I’m probably going to disappoint you by saying that I’m not really comfortable sharing specifics, though. I’m sorry! I can only assume that some (if not all) of those measures are still in place. Which means that providing information on what they are or how they work would only help those sites and hinder anyone who may now be doing that job. I don’t want to risk that. So I’ll just say that yes, there were definitely many things in place to combat that sort of thing. To give you a bit of an idea without giving too much away, here are a couple factoids:
1) Every single outsourced developer we worked with was shocked (and probably really annoyed) by the things we made them implement to follow our security guidelines and protect accounts (and prevent cheating). They weren’t used to that level of caution. Not even their security folks. TOUGH NOOGIES!
2) We once had a security consultant for Nickelodeon tell us that he’d never seen so many different methods/protections for account stealing, not even with some of his banking clients. That we had more preventative security than some banks. BWA HA HA!
Still, nothing is foolproof and every time we made a change, the scammers would make a change of their own. And we always tried to be better and more sophisticated with tracking down stolen accounts. It was a continuous dance that was not at all fun but unfortunately necessary and we worked very hard at it.
As for specific stories, I can’t really think of any good ones that I’d heard from those folks. Maybe one will come to me as I’m falling asleep tonight but I think it was just pretty boring and tedious in the day to day grind, to be honest. And endlessly frustrating.
Sorry I can say too much but I hope that at least gave you some insight into how seriously we took the task. Thanks for your question. 🙂