At 14 I was introduced to a popular game at the time called World of Warcraft, or WoW. It seemed pretty fun but I honestly got bored quickly. The best part about it was playing with my friends. However it didn't take long for the entrepreneurial side of me to kick in and I started getting distracted with making money.

There were ways to take shortcuts by purchasing ‘Gold’, the in-game currency with real money. You could pay $50 or so and get 1,000 gold to purchase in-game items. In WoW, it was divided up into about 50 different ‘realms’ to play on. Once you picked a realm you were stuck on that realm. There’s no trading between realms, no sending Gold or items, and no transferring at this time.

I had bought Gold a couple of times with my allowance, and I quickly noticed that there was one site that would frequently run deals on overstock for certain realms, such as “$10 for 1,000 gold”. I had a contact that would buy Gold to resell. So I would simply ask my contact at a different site how much he would pay for 1,000 gold on XX realm. He would typically reply somewhere around $25 or $30. Once I got confirmation I would buy as much Gold as possible for $10 / 1000g and sell it for $25 or $30. I often would do this multiple times a day making $100+.

The Next Stage

Eventually both sides caught on and I was no longer able to get those good deals. By that point I noticed I could make more money by selling full accounts. People would pay up to $1,000 for a full WoW account with the right characters and items.

I found unknown forums where people would sell their WoW accounts, and I noticed accounts for sale would always get top dollar on eBay. So I essentially did the same thing, making sure I got about 50% margins. Buy an account, then sell on eBay for 2X the money.

At this point I was doing well and making around $1,500 per week at 14 years old. It all ended when eBay banned selling WoW accounts on their website.

Change in Terms

Keep in mind, all of these things I was doing was against blizzard’s Terms of Service, but I was making insane money for a 14 year old.

Then I came across a wonderful opportunity. To give some background, in WoW there was a little-known thing called “Private Servers” or “Private Realms”. Essentially, World of Warcraft had a $15 per month subscription fee, plus the cost of the game, and not everybody wanted to pay that. So people would essentially set up their own private WoW realms (Yes this was against blizzard’s terms of service and copyright) and allow people to play for free.

There’s other benefits as well, such as different game modes, higher levels, fun custom items, etc.

Opportunity

I came across an opportunity with a guy I knew online who owned a popular forum for hacking World of Warcraft with tens of thousands of users. We entered a partnership agreement to create our own private WoW server. We would use his brand, I would handle and run the servers, and we split the money. I set up the server and started submitting it to directories and promoting it online.

A few days after I set it up, I was shocked at the amount of sign ups we had. We were getting dozens of people signing up per hour and 200+ new sign ups per day. I had to upgrade the servers every week for more resources.

We set up the ability for people to purchase in-game items, gold, level ups, and more with real money via an online store.

Within 24 hours, my jaw was on the floor with how much money people were spending for items on our hacked together, bootlegged WoW server. The orders were flooding in way faster than I ever thought possible. I would literally go watch a 45-hour episode of house, and by the time it was over I would check my e-mail and see $200 in new transactions during that 45-minute period.

To put things into perspective, I was 15 years old by this time and my friends and I thought our $100 was rich up to this point.

I added it up, and we were making over $5,000 per week most weeks and one week even $12,000. This meant I took home around $2,000 per week on average at 15 years old.

Change

Things had changed drastically. I could now buy every toy or gadget i wanted since I had no expenses. I remember buying a bicycle, a new projector ($1,000), would buy things for my friends, and iPod, etc.

My parents, confused about where this money was coming from, thought I was selling drugs. I told them it was from World of Warcraft and they didn’t believe me.

Then one day I got an e-mail from Blizzard, Inc. They had noticed our WoW server and served us with a cease and desist letter for copyright infringement. Me being 13 years old, I figured it was a problem that would just go away on its own like a car payment.

Shutdown

About a week after the e-mail, I got a notice from Paypal that they had terminated my account. I was devastated. Simultaneously, I had bought a top-of-the-line WoW account with full tier 2 armor (WoW nerds will know what that means) for $500 which turned out to be a scam. The scammer contacted blizzard after selling me the account and pretended it was stolen so he recovered it, locking me out.

I remember losing it, smashing my keyboard against the desk and my Dad and friend had to calm me down. My Dad had no idea what I was so upset about.

A New Way

I ended up calming down eventually, upset that my path to riches was gone. I had about $7,000 locked in that PayPal account that was unrecoverable. But of course, it wasn’t long before I had another idea..