http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/antigold.html

http://hubpages.com/hub/Buy-Gold-for-WoW

First, let’s try to imagine the properties of a market that is most vulnerable to becoming a lemon market.  First, it should be online.  When something is for sale online the buyer has no idea if what they are paying for is what they will receive or if they will even receive anything.  They simply have to trust the seller completely.  Second, the buyer and seller should use names that have nothing to do with their real names, making them untraceable.  Finally, the product being sold should be illegal, so that there are no authorities to report to if you are cheated and so that open discussion of which seller is best would lead to you and/or the seller being punished.  Believe it or not, such a market does exist… in the World of Warcraft gold selling market.  With over 10 million player worldwide, and the percentage of people who prefer the easy way of doing things, the WoW gold selling market is larger that one may expect.  A new player would be hard pressed to go an hour or less without getting spammed with offers of ‘cheapest gold’ or ‘cheap power leveling.’  Even a seasoned player would consider it pretty good to make 500 gold/hr in the legitimate way.  It is easy to see why it is tempting to pay $20 real dollars for 1000 gold if someone was able to make more than about $10 in a real job.  They could spend more time in the game doing exciting things rather than simply farming for gold.  It is this that allows the real money for gold market to exist in the first place.

The problem with this market is that the buyer, even when they get what they want, doesn’t get anything ‘real.’  This makes it difficult for the seller to advertise that they actually have the product, because there is no way to prove they actually have the product to sell to begin with.  Sites like ebay or amazon police this by having the feedback system.  This lets the buyer know whether or not a seller is good, which lets them infer whether or not a product is good.  It is in the sellers best interest to sell what buyers want so they get good feedback.  This cannot happen in WoW because the main company Blizzard made the buying and selling of gold or sharing account information illegal, and if they catch you doing either you are likely to get banned from the game.  This means there can be no legit feedback because if you are caught saying how good it was to buy gold you will get kicked out, and any ratings there are can be completely fabricated because sources cannot be given.  If you are cheated, you cant report it because you will be in just as much trouble as the seller.  This pretty much means that anyone can make a fake gold selling site, take your money and give you nothing with no fear of retribution.  This makes the gold selling market a perfect Lemon market.  So, if you’re just starting out and spending a little extra cash to make playing the game easy sounds like a good idea, remember you’re asking to get cheated!