All-time Greatest Ultima Online Scams!

Couldn't agree more. That invasion introduced me to how wonderful Trinsic is. I dont use it as a city for npc vendor needs, but for banking i love it. But yes, i apologize for the derailing of the post. Back to All-time Best Scams.

Don't apologize! Jou'Nar is worth it!!!

The Trinsic town invasion was my favorite OSI event as well. I was lazily fishing in the park one afternoon when the invasion started. Undead started walking into town and guards didn't work when I called them. I ran around town screaming that the undead were coming.



If the invasion ever happens on here, I shall defend Trinsic!

Since the thread has already been slightly derailed...I cant remember if that invasion happened for me on Seige or Cats but I think Seige.

Juo'nar appeared at the Yew Orc fort before and we entered the town in significant numbers with him. A lot of people were killed and the town fighting was awesome.

I don't know any good scams. Honestly I wouldn't use then if I did. I'm just a big ol softy I guess.

I once scammed an entire UO free shard into giving me more credit than I deserve. I am was really just a town crier that became self-aware.

Also, ill start reading up on this Juo'nar. Sounds interesting.

Back when the Stealth skill first came out, people were way less cautious homeowners at first. I worked with another player - He would go to the bank sitters or the trading sites finding people selling bulk rares. He'd say he's trying to find the perfect decorations for his house and that he needed to see how they looked oriented as lockdowns rather than inside of a bag. They'd have this little working session in the mark's house going over what would look good, whether my guy really needed this item or that, and they'd build up a level of trust the whole time. They would go back and forth between house and bank or his house and our house several times to get the mark comfortable and less weary. We would bring other high end rares for the mark to put next to his so we could judge how things looked. That usually inspired massive confidence, and we never brought more than we could afford to lose in a trade gone bad.

We discovered that the first few times my guy would come back to the house, the mark would inevitably detect hidden, and so I would wait outside the house hidden for the majority of it. By the end of the working session, though, I kid you not, they would almost never continue to do it. Especially when my guy would keep leaving and coming back so frequently with his own rares. Sometimes my guy would pretend like he'd been using Detect Hidden every time himself. I can't tell you how many times the marks reached this level of gullibility.

The last time my guy came back after they'd reached some kind of deal, I'd stealth in to a perfect spot where I could maneuver and not get caught by our mark running around. My guy would say "Alright, let's load up all of the things we agreed on into one bag, and I'll buy the lot from you". The mark would load up the bag, lock it down, and my guy would sign off on it before recalling to the bank to "get the money".

I'd wait for those magic words "(no longer locked down)", snatch the entire bag, and recall to the bank millions richer.

We did this at least 15 times in the period of one month with over an 80% success rate before the shard became fully aware of this scam. Anytime I'd get discovered, my guy would help our mark hunt me down and kill me, and they would usually complete some tiny deal so the mark wouldn't associate the two of us. We also used Disguise Kits every chance we got. We knew eventually people would get enough of the word out to warn the shard of our scam, but this allowed us to keep doing it that much longer before it became common knowledge.

The guy I worked with constantly blew my mind at how well he could work over a mark and get them comfortable - it was something I knew I'd never be able to do. Luckily he was just as bad at avoiding detection, moving quickly while stealthed, and picking the bag up faster than the marks due to his high ping, so we needed each other.

It was a damn good time to be an asshole, and as a teenager, I didn't feel an ounce of guilt about it since it was done completely within the rules of the game.

[edit] It should probably be said that that was nearly 2 decades ago. I grew out of that immature phase pretty quickly, especially after an experience being on the receiving end of a nasty scam... By my partner mentioned above no less. [/edit]

I was partial to real estate scams. Back in the early days of OSI, a house deed looked like a book available at any provisioner's shop. These early deeds were stealable, but that's another story.

To transfer a house, you transferred the deed. Obviously this was prone to abuse, so third-party housing brokers started popping up all across Britannia. So why not start a fake brokerage firm to seal the deal? You know, one that was complete with bogus ICQ accounts and a Geocities page with linked ICQ status bars and a go.to address for a more credible sound when sharing the address in-game. Heck, you didn't even have to own the house you were "selling". Better that you had nothing to do with it or the area all together.

It could take a few hours to gain the mark's complete confidence, but when you think about it, it was a really fast and easy way to make a few hundred k. For obvious reasons this was a bannable offense.

Once upon a time, in OSI Atlantic circa 2000, there played the legendary chinese american kid named Vincent Phung. He had to be no older than 10 or 11 years old, and he was like the Short Round to my Indiana Jones. Somehow he was able to scam someone into letting him place a vendor a few houses down from mine. Perhaps in a bid to pay off his debt owed to my guildy Gus the Pirate, who constantly yelled and threatened Phung as to the whereabouts of his 5k that was allegedly owed to him from a previous guild, old Vinny set up a "Mystery Box" vendor. For only 5k a pop, you could win prizes! Well, somewhere along the line Vinny "forgot" to actually put prizes in them. They were either empty or you'd buy useless crap like npc vendor sandals , torch, random crap etc. He bragged about how much money he made selling junk and a few times I came across some angry townsfolk who had been swindled by the Phungmeister. Just for laughs, I tattled on vinny to the GM's then hid near his vendor to watch it all unfold. I don't remember what happened but he might have gotten a lecture, but i'm not sure. The GM had sent me a message saying "Hello " or something, which was funny because at the time I didn't know they could see me hidden.

To further the laughs, I made a fake screenname after one of the GM's names I remembered from the last time I got jailed and interrogated, GM Booker. So later on that day I sent a message to him as "GM Booker UO" and talked to him in the same robotic ways OSI GM's would at that point. At first it seemed to work, as I lectured him over scamming people and threatened to ban him hahah. Eventually he figured it was me I think.

As to what happened to Blair, the vendor, and Vincent Phung, Journeyman warrior for hire and Mystery Box scam artist... well, Blair was evicted by the homeowner after many complaints... and Vincent Phung could often be found around Moonglow bank spamming "Jonryman Warrior For Hire But I No Kill Myslef" in a bid to make legit money.

I remember being like from the age 7-11 so around 1997-2001 not sure eras and after getting scammed a few times I would eventually get to scamming myself.

Some would be simple ones involving clever ways to trick people into overloading inventory to make checks, deeds or Items drop after Canceling trades. I remember I used to use a very simple scam for selling houses as well but I can't remember what it was.

Back then there was so many people & only hardcore people read forums so communication on stuff was minimum so these scams worked for long periods of times before people started catching on lol...


UO taught me a lot of things at young age... one being that in order to be successful you have to be competitive & aggressive. Also to not put anything past anyone, the knife that saves you could be the same one in your back to end you!

Good ol Atlantic & Catskills

Sadly back then i mostly just found people to unleash "409" on.... (409 was a pk guild i ran) we would find a location with 3-4 people farming or whatever and bring in 5 reds lol. The irony though is i have yet to murder a single person on UOR .

My most nefarious scheme...

A guy at Del bank was selling ranger armor(pretty sure it was a full set), I offered 60, he agreed (thought I meant 60k). He loaded the window, I put my pile in... he accepted!

Looking back, now knowing the mechanics, makes it funnier.

Someone got me at the bank here with a bottle of patriot ale. They did a whole song and dance to get me but it woulda worked without that because I didn't know patriot ale was basically and exp pot. It blew up on me and hit them standing next to me they called guards and looted me. Wasn't much to loot as I was expecting a scam of some sort. Anyone talking to you randomly at a bank always has and always will end in some sort of scam. I think it's fun and will play along to see what the scam is .. don't think I've ever lost much to scams tho, just a few regs and cheap armor

So I pulled this scam a few times back on OSI. Me and a few buddies would wait around WBB or any other populated bank looking for noobish vet characters riding an ethereal. Most Vets wouldn't fall for this so we had to be quite selective with our marks. Once we found a new enough looking 3 year vet player riding an Ethy we would make our move.

You start chatting with the guy/girl and ask them if they have heard about duping. We had all heard the term before but some of us had no idea how to do it. (Duping for those who don't know is making a copy of all the items you have on your character at the time) If they hadn't heard about "duping" you could move forward with the scam.

You explain to the mark that you can get them a copy of their Ethy mount if they just follow some simple steps, for a small price!! Pretty amazing right?! So most will start drooling about the chance to get a free Ethy mount and will gladly pay whatever you were asking. So with half the gold in hand (half before, half after) you begin to explain about "UO Space" (UO Space is completely fictitious)

You explain that the Ethy must be bugged into UO space and upon re entry will duplicate, generating a new Ethy mount!!

So to enter UO Space, have the mark click and drag their Ethy mount holding it in their cursor. Once that is done have them toggle their arm/disarm hotkey. This makes the Ethy disappear, and normally the mark goes ballistic. Calm them down and explain that the mount is now in "UO Space" as planned. Simply log out and back in and you will have a duplicate in your bag! Its that simple!!

As soon as the mark logs out the Ethy drops to their feet, you scoop it up and poof, gone in a cloud of smoke, new Ethy in hand.

I played on a small free shard several years ago and was farming in Destard when a GM showed up. We got to chatting and I convinced him to place a spawner down and set it to be visible so I could spawn stuff to kill (which already wasn't a good start for this GM). So...I mean what should I do but spawn a GM Stone instead of monsters and make myself a GM? And the best part was, I wasn't even trying to hide the fact that I had a GM character. I became part of the staff on that shard with no one's permission, even chatting with the admin several times and no one was the wiser.


I mean I don't feel great about it but it's kind of funny.

All-time Greatest Ultima Online Scams...

Telamon: CUB will be soon [tm]

BOOKER was the greatest GM UO ever had.

People often thought that each shard had its own GMs but most GMs were the same across all shards.

Booker was a legend on pacific.

Hahahah yeah I got jailed by GM Booker once and he typed so fast I swear I still believe he had some prewritten robotic responses because I couldn't get a word in and anything I said was pretty much ignored hah

What's that guy's name who runs the "Museum" or "Library" where people just give him valuable shit for free?

Anyways, that's a scam.