How to NOT Get Banned for NX Fraud

If you’re a member of one of gMS’ out-of-game communities or visit the Nexon forums, you hear it a lot:

“OMG I got banned unfairly for NX fraud”
“OMG they banned me for NX I paid for Nexon only wants money”

We all know the story, right?

Well, I have some news for you: There is no such thing as an “unfair” ban for NX fraud. If you get banned, the fault lies on you, your bank, your credit card issuer, PayPal, or anyone that’s ever charged you any amount of NX to your account before. The myth is, “As long as Nexon gets their money, they don’t care.” The fact is, as long as Nexon gets their money for the NX they gave you, you’ll be fine.

Now, I can’t really debunk the myth of the “mysterious NX fraud” bans that people claim are happening to them, but as a long-time user that’s charged a lot of NX to my account since I started playing some 20 months ago without being banned, it comes to me that there’s always some story behind the “mysterious” NX fraud bans, just like the mysterious unfair hacking bans that Nexon CSR “NxJoeW” used to prove wrong every time.

And so, I shall tell you now to NOT get banned for NX Fraud:

All it really comes down to are six simple rules to follow.

1. Verify your PayPal account
This is the one true thing you can do to prevent yourself from being caught by a random hold on funds by PayPal: verify your identity with them. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for everyone because you do need both a bank account and a credit card in order to do it, but if you do all it takes is one automated phone call and you’re set.

2. If you must used an unverified PayPal account, do NOT use the eCheck feature.
The eCheck feature allows someone with an unverified account to make a payment when they don’t have the sufficient funds in their account and have PayPal automatically transfer the money over, when it then makes the payment once the transfer has gone through. This does take several business days (usually a week in the US and up to two in Canada) and because of this, can cause problems with buying NX. Why? Because when you charge NX to your account, it goes through right away, then expects payment. In short, they’ve given you the NX you’re paying for, but it hasn’t been paid for yet. For that reason, if PayPal decides to randomly hold your funds, you’re hooped.

3. NEVER have someone else charge NX for you
It doesn’t matter if it’s with your PayPal account or theirs, don’t do it. In the case that it’s your account, PayPal might find out that the payment is coming from a different IP and stop the payment. (Resulting in you getting banned.) Being charged from someone else’s PayPal account poses even a bigger risk. If by some chance if a future payment to Nexon doesn’t go through on their account, or they charge back any payment they ever made to Nexon (regardless whether or not it was to your account), you WILL get banned. I do recall someone e-mailing Nexon about the issue of one PayPal being used on multiple account, and I believe that was the response. (Unfortunately, although I do remember that it was on Sleepywood, I can’t remember where.)

4. NEVER go behind your parents’ back with their PayPal or Credit Card
This is self-explanatory. Remember what FOX said about this exact issue, making us all look like credit card thieves? Parents will get pissed, or not know what that charge is on their card, and most likely will charge it back. (And by now you should know what that means.)

5. Keep a record of all your payments to Nexon.
When your transaction is completely, record the transaction number somewhere. What I like to do is keep a spreadsheet containing all my transaction numbers, with their associated PayPal transaction IDs, when I made the payment, and for how much. That way, if a payment does go awry and you get banned for it, you can go straight to Nexon and try to work it out.

6. If in doubt, go prepaid or PayByCash instead.
Both will ensure that you’ve paid for your NX before you actually get it. When using PayByCash as an alternative to PayPal, you’re paying directly out of your bank account. In addition, you won’t get your NX until they receive your payment, which means although it takes longer to actually get it, you won’t get banned if by some chance the payment doesn’t go through.

If you ever DO get banned for NX fraud:

1. If your ban is temporary, don’t think you’ve gotten off easy.
NXJoeW said this once; Getting a temporary ban for NX fraud means that the issue is not with paypal, but with the customer’s bank or card issuer, and they have to work it out with them. If they fail to, that temporary ban will be changed to permanent shortly after it expires.

2. Don’t whine to the community.
We don’t need to hear that you got “unfairly banned” for NX fraud, so don’t bother. IF you want to say that you got banned for NX fraud and you think you have a lead on what caused it, then you can ask for help, but it’s better to go right to Nexon, since we can’t really do anything about getting your account back.

3. Contact Nexon, and work with them cooperatively.
Open a ticket in customer support under the “Billing -> Banned for Billing Issue” category. Try to explain in detail what you’ve gathered up from the situation so far, and provide transaction numbers where appropriate. If you have no idea what it was for, then tell them that you don’t know what exactly happened. Hopefully, they’ll be able to guide you into what you need to do in order to get your account reinstated.

4. Contact PayPal if directed to do so.
Usually, if the problem is with PayPal, (usually with their “randomly holding funds” thing) Nexon will contact you saying that there was a problem, and also tell you the PayPal transaction ID of the payment that was stopped. It is now your job to sort it out with PayPal to get the funds over to Nexon. You may also want to contact Nexon as described in #3 once you’ve finished getting things straight with PayPal.

5. If you know what went wrong, try not to do it again.
This is pretty self-explanatory.

I’m hoping that this becomes useful to people to help them from getting banned for an awry payment. I just finally had enough with people complaining about Nexon and how they’re greedy cash mongers, when really the fact is if that was the case they probably would’ve been sued by now. Has that happened? No.

So remember, kids, if you get banned for NX, it’s your fault.