shapu wrote:
digital_anime_fan_20, I know that if I were doing something like this, here's how it would go:
I'd restock, like a normal player. Note that a lot of the accounts donating to the money tree were older, so they probably had some accumulated wealth.
Then I (and my friends as well) would start really unloading most of our goods, and use our massed wealth to purchase products that we intend to dupe.
Then start duping the items and putting them out there. As they sell, you can buy more and different items to dupe, and then keep the chain rolling. It eventually becomes a snowball that's almost impossible to stop, because the only cost outlay you had was the initial one, and after that everything is free money.
My guess is that this was a coordinated, team effort by a few players who were sick of neopets, or wanted to make a point, or just wanted to mess with the staff. In cases of mass scamming of any game, it's usually one of those three.
EDIT: And duplicating NP wouldn't be hard. They probably just bought a few bags of broken neopoints, and duped them, since they go from item to cash directly, without selling them.
To clarify: I wasn't involved in this, and I have no idea how to dupe items. But the above is the most logical process.
Ya know, I hadn’t really thought about the broken bag of neopoints, but now that you mention it, those would be a good way of getting some quick np, especially if they could just dup them.
I agree, this was most likely a team effort, theres no easy way one person could have pulled this off on their own.