False advertising is prevalent throughout the virtual currency industry, but today I’d like to take the time to point out one particular outrageous example. The fairly popular virtual currency vendor wowmine.com bases its entire business on a single claim that they advertise everywhere.
“As Low As $5/1000 W0W Gold <5 Minute Delivery, US/EU On Sale”
They specialize in an automated vendor process where after placing an order you automatically receive a phone call and automatically confirm your order (fraud prevention). You can then log into your account on the website and click a button that says you are ready for your gold and they have a bot automatically log in and deliver the gold to you (note: you are told to be at a certain mailbox location before hand and have to be a certain distance from the bot, etc.). This is a really cool concept, although it only works when they have currency to delivery. It doesn’t matter how fast that automatic bot can log on or how few (costly) human resources it saves if they don’t have currency on stock to deliver to you. Here is wowmine’s big problem.
Wowmine is a Chinese company specializes in cheap currency. You can read our full review of them here. However, they are completely unable to keep an adequate stock of currency. As such the claim that they deliver in less than five minutes never happens. The surprising thing is on the website they tell you how much stock they have for every server (which they claim is updated hourly and 90% accurate). However in reality these numbers are 100% fictional and completely false. They mean nothing. They are intentionally engineered to deceive you. They also have a list of “average delivery times” that they allegedly update every 10 days. Simply looking at the data and our test results along with hundreds of customers claims quickly showed that this data was also doctored.
They went through a lot of trouble to be intentionally deceitful. Anyways, when I contacted wowmine’s live support about this matter after a bit of arguing I received the following response:
“It seems to me that you're trying to accuse us in making false advertisement, which is a serious offence regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act and the Lanham Act. You might have failed to grasp the essential difference of effective titling and false advertisement, in which the latter normally comes with "small print" that's hidden in some obscured page bottom linked by the terms and agreement. Our "<5 MINUTES DELIVERY GUARANTEE" banner is hardly resembling the description. The banner offers all page viewers a direct line to the explanatory page -- Delivery Guarantee, where the details are lay out in point form and are in clearly formatted Verdana 11pt font. Therefore, if you may consider the Delivery Guarantee page as "small print," I'd suggest you get a second opinion from your friends and family. I tend to think that few would agree with your observation. Besides, unlike some of our competitors who claims INSTANT DELIVERY, which is deceptive if not blunt falsehood, we display our past delivery time frame performance for all of our potential gold buyers to examine for themselves in our Past Delivery Performance page (linked right below our logo on the top navigation bar): the % marks the number of delivery that falls into the delivery time frame (column) among ALL the deliveries during the last 10 days. Furthermore, all of our service agents, including myself, were trained not to make optimistic claims. Before making orders, customers are welcome to come to our live chat support to inquire the stock status. We are only allowed to have 2 kind of responses: telling the customer if the stock is going to be enough if he or she order now; or we would say that we are currently out of stock and would direct the customer to examine the Past Delivery Performance page to get a rough idea of the delivery time frame. The "< 5 MINUTES DELIVERY" is only achievable when we have enough stock for a particular order, which is explained in plain English in our Delivery Guarantee page. As a matter of fact, thanks to our state-of-the-art deliverying system, "> 5 MINUTES DELIVERY" is our unique advantage that we feel so proud of that we want to tell everybody on the frontpage of our website. If you felt cheated in anyway by our customer service agent in the past chat session, you may ask me for our Escalation Manager's contact. He will launch an investigation to the potential misconduct and will make reasonable compensation for any inconvenience that might have caused you.”
They must get this question a lot as that was obviously a cut/paste scripted response. So they use small print they say. So let’s look at that small print. (Just because they put it in large print, but put it hidden on another page doesn’t really make it large print, in fact it makes it invisible print until clicked)
"WoWMine.com utilizes in-house developed state-of-the-art technology to make expeditious delivery without human intervention. Therefore, under most circumstances, the World of Warcraft gold will be delivered to your ingame WoW email account within 5 minutes after we receive your credit card payment. As a matter of fact, if your order is in stock, in ideal "lab-tested" scenarios, World of Warcraft Postal Service Normal (regular) Mail Delivery (see World of Warcraft Game Manual p. 148-9) enables you to receive the gold in 5-10 minutes after your credit card payment is confirmed and cleared.
Unless
1) World of WarCraft (WoW) are having the Weekly Scheduled Maintenance (every Tuesday begins at 5 AM and ends at 11 AM PST); or
2) the Realm (Server) is busy and is getting itself a queue, daily peak between 01:00am - 5:00am PST. Check the official Realm Status page for current queue status; or
3) the daily peak periods of our business, causing delivery congestion; or
4) World of Warcraft Postal Service Normal (regular) Mail Deliver delay, up to 2 hours, occasionally; or
5) delay caused by recreation of character on certain realm for account safety reasons can take up to 4 to 12 hours, occasionally (check with our Live Chat agents if such delay exist on your realm before making the payment for the order); or
6) a new patch or update of WoW hampers our WoW gold delivery system; or
7) unpredictably, the order you made is queued ahead by someone else whose order was significantly large, placed almost at the same time as yours, though confirmed and finished making the payment sooner than you do: as a result, causing your purchased Realm and Faction flagged out-of-stock after your payment is made; or
8) the credit / debit / gift card processors mishandled the payment causing unsignaled transaction; or
9) your order is suspected of dishonest fraudulent activities*, such as unauthorized or stolen credit card; or
10) your order falls into pre-order category;"
Here is the thing, however our test orders didn’t’ fall under any of those conditions. The point of the matter is that they claim 5 minute delivery if they have the stock. However, they never have the stock, and the numbers they post online (even when they say they have 40,000 gold in stock) are always false. The customer service agents always tell us that the gold they said they have on stock is in fact reserved for other customers. As such in reality they never seem to have gold in stock and are always in a mad rush to acquire it to keep up with demand. It’s a losing battle of cost efficiency at your expense.
Advertising that you have gold as low as $5/1000 everyone on the internet and then notifying people that this deal is seasonal (and in fact never happens) is false advertising.
Advertising that delivery is in under 5 minutes when you are in stock, but then falsely posting stock numbers to trick customers into thinking this claim will apply to them is false advertising and intentionally misleading.
Posting average delivery times that are obviously doctored is false advertising.
Not everywhere on your website is that claim made and is it linked to the “small” (invisible until clicked) text.
Here is a standard test for ethics, if you don’t want your actions to be fully disclosed on the front page of the Washington Post (or your national newspaper), you probably shouldn’t be doing them.
However, what really ticked me off even more than all of the false claims that WoWMine made is the patronizing insulting way that they defended them in their delusion scripted doublespeak.
“I'd suggest you get a second opinion from your friends and family. I tend to think that few would agree with your observation”
That’s no way to treat any customer or any person and frankly it’s downright insulting. Anyways, I did ask some friends and family, guess what they agree with me!
