Complaint Review: Gamewar - Internet Internet

(Offer-# in question is A2305301)

In late November I decided I should buy my nephew a few Christmas presents since he was moving back to Missouri in early December, but I needed money, so selling my Final Fantasy XIV account made sense. On the 25th of November, despite having sold all of my previous accounts on an auction website, I decided to try GameWar.com since they seem to buy accounts themselves and then resell them themselves, so I figured the process might be a bit faster. This thought was confirmed when I checked the FAQ on GameWar.com's website- I've copied the relevant entry below:

"How long does the sell account process take to complete?"

"In order to sell or trade your account to us, please follow these steps. Go to the sell account option on our website. Submit your character information. Choose which payment method you wish for us to send to you for your account. Click get quote. You will now receive a quote. If you accept this quote, complete the final page for information, and wait for an agent to work on, and issue you a payment. Once you have submitted your account, please remain patient while an agent reviews your order. 

Normally the process may take up to 72 hours, but on extreme cases, you may experience delay times up to a week. Don't worry, we will NEVER touch your account until an agent verifys the account, and issues a payment. If you are waiting for more than a week, this may mean that we did not receive your information, we are not interested in purchasing your character or there may have been a technical issue. Please note, we are actively purchasing characters, but we do occasionally deny specific accounts as we cannot sell them due to overstock."

I filled out the forms, and then accepted the bid of $238.80 for my account. Three days later (November 28th) I received two emails, one saying that my password was incorrect, and one saying that my secret question/answer were incorrect. Well, this was impossible, since both of those were copied and pasted from a spreadsheet file I keep for such things (the file is hidden, buried in windows system files, and heavily-encrypted for security purposes) and I tried signing into FFXIV with them when I received the emails and they worked fine, but the emails came directly from gamewar's official email address, so I figure "okay, maybe they made a little mistake, no biggie, I'll send them the details again", and I did.

Less than twelve hours later I try to sign in to my Square-Enix account again and find that my password has changed. This upsets me a bit, as I've received no further communication from Gamewar.com and the offer status on their website still says "Awaiting Your Reply", so I try to reset it using my email address and secret question/answer (just once because I don't want to lock the account up) and it doesn't work- one or both of those elements were changed as well. Despite my misgivings at this point and the fact that Gamewar.com has blatantly ignored its own rules, I decide that with it being the busy Christmas season and all, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I've sent an email to Gamewar.com every three days, like clockwork, at first asking them for a status update on my account as it was still listed as "Awaiting Your Reply", even though the password obviously worked for them just fine, and then quoting their own "One week maximum" and "We'll NEVER change your account details until we've paid you" rules. It has now been two weeks since I received the emails from Gamewar.com mistakenly claiming I gave them the incorrect password and secret question/answer, and two weeks since I lost the ability to sign into my account, and I've yet to receive a single reply from a human being at Gamewar.com. I've tried to send them messages on facebook, submitting a "Facebook ticket", emails (as I've mentioned), and I've also clicked the "Real Time Agent" probably a million times (random times of the day and random days of the week) and it never does more than bring up a "send us an email" page. I simply HAVE to conclude from all of this that the company is in the business of ripping off accounts from people or that they, quite innocently, have the absolute worst customer service system in place on the planet. I've never seen anything that even compares to how badly this is set up.

Since I find this both disturbing (further evidence of fraud) and a little funny, I figured I should show the only email I've received in the two weeks since I lost access to my account (an automated response).

"This e-mail is related to customers who are interested or have purchased account(s) only. All other customers, please ignore this e-mail. Due to the recent bulk amount of commonly asked question e-mails, we request that you look at our website database of over 400+ answers to your question(s). If the answer you were searching for is not found in our database, please e-mail us back providing as much detail as possible about your question(s) so one of our US agents can reply back to your question as well as add your question to our answers database. Until we receive a reply e-mail back from you that our database did not answer your question(s), our agents will not reply back to your first email as we will assume that our database answered your question(s). If you are looking for an update on an existing or current account submission, please register to our website in order to view your order status as our US agents cannot provide updates through e-mail. If you have problems opening our URL links in this e-mail, please copy and paste the URL to your right into your web browser: http://www.gamewar.com/support .