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Hello again. After years of silence, I'd like to share with you a few of my thoughts on a time when Neopets was only just beginning to see the use of autobuyers and score senders. More specifically, my involvement in the sudden innovation of Neopet real-money trading that occured in 2007. Many questions remain unanswered and I would like to shed some light on a few events that took place during the "Neopoint boom".
Before the boom, websites that sold Neopoints were hosted in the US. They sometimes sold accounts but there was no website that sold pets or items. Hard to believe? Not really. The websites sold neopoints, that's all they sold. After Neopets was a few years old, the relatively high risk associated with trading large amounts of pure or ETS items was becoming old. People wanted something new and I gave it to them.
NeopetSales introduced innovative new ways to get rich in Neopets. For the first time ever, you could buy that HTS book you want for your collection instead of risking your account to transfer obvious large sums of pure via multiple trades. Add a couple PBs, a negg or two and a couple gourmet food items and check out. With a streamlined and robust order flow, checkout was quick and easy, and your order was delievered in as little as 15 minutes. My customers almost never got frozen because I sold mostly HTS items, things TNT don't look closely at.
In less than a month, I was pulling in more sales than every other Neopoint website combined. In fact, due to a violent explosion in sales volume, I elected to partner with the owner of Neopoints.ca to fill orders on time. I was doing so much business that my host was faxed a cease and desist letter from Viacom and my website was taken offline. Only for a day until I moved to an offshore host, but that's all the critics needed. After NeopetSales was shut down, every website that used to sell Neopoints now sold items as well. What a coincidence... New websites like NeoItemsNow and NeopetItems started popping up. I had created a monster. Left and right, websites were being shut down by Viacom. Everyone was moving to offshore hosts and a whole new economic boom was insighted in the Neoboards to keep the prices of extremely rare items under control, in light of the new found solidarity of all of these hundreds of millions of liquid neopoints. If you worked in Neopoints at the time, it was a mess. But it evened itself out in a couple months.
How did I fill orders totaling in the hundreds of millions on a daily basis? Score sending. Yup, that's right. You might think score sending makes no money if you do it right. I'm here to tell you how wrong you are. I had fourteen computers, each with between fifteen and twenty score senders running, on six different 10 meg cable interent connections. It was beautiful, and it was ice-proof. Using a finely tuned SS list, only SSing for six hours a day per account with shifts allowing for 24 hour score sending, at my peak I was generating over 150 million NP a day on about 1,000 Neopet accounts, two accounts to a proxy. I transferred the Neopoints through what I liked to refer to as the tree of heat. The further away you get from the source, the less likely you are to be iced and thus you're hotter. So I liked to move all the NP down the tree at least four times, consolidating larger amounts from more accounts each time until transferring to my two main accounts (which remain unfrozen to this day).
But it's all over and done now. Maybe in a few days I'll write another blog entry about Ab3r or about how my identity was stolen in order to scam a bunch of people out of millions of Neopoints.
Before the boom, websites that sold Neopoints were hosted in the US. They sometimes sold accounts but there was no website that sold pets or items. Hard to believe? Not really. The websites sold neopoints, that's all they sold. After Neopets was a few years old, the relatively high risk associated with trading large amounts of pure or ETS items was becoming old. People wanted something new and I gave it to them.
NeopetSales introduced innovative new ways to get rich in Neopets. For the first time ever, you could buy that HTS book you want for your collection instead of risking your account to transfer obvious large sums of pure via multiple trades. Add a couple PBs, a negg or two and a couple gourmet food items and check out. With a streamlined and robust order flow, checkout was quick and easy, and your order was delievered in as little as 15 minutes. My customers almost never got frozen because I sold mostly HTS items, things TNT don't look closely at.
In less than a month, I was pulling in more sales than every other Neopoint website combined. In fact, due to a violent explosion in sales volume, I elected to partner with the owner of Neopoints.ca to fill orders on time. I was doing so much business that my host was faxed a cease and desist letter from Viacom and my website was taken offline. Only for a day until I moved to an offshore host, but that's all the critics needed. After NeopetSales was shut down, every website that used to sell Neopoints now sold items as well. What a coincidence... New websites like NeoItemsNow and NeopetItems started popping up. I had created a monster. Left and right, websites were being shut down by Viacom. Everyone was moving to offshore hosts and a whole new economic boom was insighted in the Neoboards to keep the prices of extremely rare items under control, in light of the new found solidarity of all of these hundreds of millions of liquid neopoints. If you worked in Neopoints at the time, it was a mess. But it evened itself out in a couple months.
How did I fill orders totaling in the hundreds of millions on a daily basis? Score sending. Yup, that's right. You might think score sending makes no money if you do it right. I'm here to tell you how wrong you are. I had fourteen computers, each with between fifteen and twenty score senders running, on six different 10 meg cable interent connections. It was beautiful, and it was ice-proof. Using a finely tuned SS list, only SSing for six hours a day per account with shifts allowing for 24 hour score sending, at my peak I was generating over 150 million NP a day on about 1,000 Neopet accounts, two accounts to a proxy. I transferred the Neopoints through what I liked to refer to as the tree of heat. The further away you get from the source, the less likely you are to be iced and thus you're hotter. So I liked to move all the NP down the tree at least four times, consolidating larger amounts from more accounts each time until transferring to my two main accounts (which remain unfrozen to this day).
But it's all over and done now. Maybe in a few days I'll write another blog entry about Ab3r or about how my identity was stolen in order to scam a bunch of people out of millions of Neopoints.
