Beware of cheap powerleveling: Signs of a Bot or Scam Site

You may be enticed by sites that offer really cheap powerleveling, free remakes and promises of no bans. Don't fall into their marketing strategies and become another victim to their scam.

With the growth of the powerleveling industry and new sites popping up daily, it's really hard to tell the difference between a legitimate powerleveling site and a scam or botting site. In this guide we list the common signs of a scam and botting site, with the hopes that next time you are browsing for powerleveling, you won't get scammed.

Signs of a Scam Site:
Scam sites are the worst kind of people in the industry, because they have no intention of completing your powerleveling order. Normally they just want your account so they can strip your characters and sell the gold or use your account to spam their advertisements and sell gold with till the account is closed.

Most of these sites are new or have no reputation history and with companies with a year or more experience. There is no reason you should be the one they cut their teeth on. Some of the sites of a scam site are:

1. Unrealistic Powerleveling packages
- 1-70 WoW Powerleveling Arena Package 20 Days - $300
- Full S3 Arena & Vindicators Sets
- 375 Paired Professions
- Epic Flying Mount

If you take the current cost of gold, PvP gear, powerleveling the toon to 70, etc... there is no way a site can offer you this package for $300. Plus you can't pug an S3 Arena set and the time to even do it with an experienced 5 man team is weeks. So just go back to google and do some more searching for powerleveling.

2. Guaranteed No Bans: This is a pure scam since they really mean "No Closures" not "No suspensions". Since 99.9% of the time if an account is caught for powerleveling or caught breaking the EULA, you'll get a warning and a suspension for the first time offender. So the sites offering this scam are banking on the fact that you'll get suspended and steal your money.

3. Fake Seals, Reputation and Links: Many scam sites will use fake or copied reputation links and seals to make them look legitimate. This fools many people as they don't take the time to check if they are real. Always check out the reputation links and feed back from other websites.

Signs of a Botting Site:
In the past year majority of the powerleveling industry has switched from human gamers to automated programs powerleveling your character. Robots "Bots" are software programs created to interact with the game and play your character. One of the major flaws of bots is they look like a bot and act like a bot, doing the same repetitive action over and over. They also normally grind in the same area for hours on end and unable to communicate or interact with other gamers. This is why so many people are banned using bots outside of the programs themselves being detected.

The follow are a few signs a site is using a bot to powerlevel your character:

1. Really Cheap powerleveling packages
- 1-60 WoW Powerleveling Package $65
- 1-70 WoW Powerleveling Package $140
This is a common trait between scam and botting sites really cheap powerleveling packages. Since botting sites have almost no labor costs they can offer really cheap prices for their powerleveling.

2. Time to complete a powerleveling order
- 1-60 WoW Powerleveling Package 15 days
- 1-70 WoW Powerleveling Package 22 days
Since bots can only grind on mobs and not quest, their experience per hour is very low and normally will take a lot longer to complete.

3. 100% US Powerleveling: Any site that advertises they use 100% US Powerleveling or US Gamers to level your accounts, is a botting site or scam site. The labor costs are to high to make it competitive and affordable to offer powerleveling services by hand using US Gamers.

4. Free Remakes: Another common trait between Scam and Botting sites is the "Free Remake" guarantee. That if your account is closed or suspended, they will remake your account. Even your safest powerleveling company can't afford to remake every suspensions or closure that happens.

5. "Skinning, Mining, Herbalism" only: Sites that only offer those skills in a package and never offer any paired professions are normally botting sites. This is because bots can't make things and only pick things up.

Signs to botting in progress:
If you've already placed an order with a site and you think they might be botting your account. The following are common signs of botting:

- No Quests - Most bots can't quest so there is nothing in the log.
- No Quest items - Since bots can't quest, they normally won't have any quest items.
- No Reputation - Since you only get reputation for completing quests your character will have very little reputation or nothing at all.
- Long hours in the same zone - Since bots just grind in 1 spot for many hours, they normally will not be moving around much.
- Walking the same path or loop - Some bots like mmoglider run a set path or loop and if you have a 2nd account you can watch your toon run that path or loop.
- Same attack skills used on every mob - Since bots are programs they normally just use the same attack sequence on every mob. If you got a 2nd account, watch your toon and see if it does the same attack sequence.

These are just a few of the signs of scam and botting sites, we hope you found them useful and they help prevent you from being scammed. The following are some tips on checking the reputation and history of a website.

Good Reputation Sites are:
- Markeedragon.com: Largest forums site for powerleveling and other services and uses Trustwho. (ID verification service) Their reputation service is left by forum members who are trustwho verified and if caught scamming their account is revoked along with all rating posts. So only legit forum members can leave a feed back rating.

- Bizrate or Shopzilla store rating: Almost every legitimate powerleveling site will have a bizrate or shopzilla store rating account. This is the survey that most sites have you fill out, after purchasing a product. This is a good start to search and check a sites customer feedback.

- Google: Google a website to see what others have posted about them, but remember anyone can post anything on the internet. This is where things can get very grey, because most scammer sites will post fake scammer posts about legitimate powerleveling sites and positive posts about their site. So use bizrate & markeedragon.com first and take google & yahoo with a the mind set these could be fake.