We know there’s still quite a few users out there who are completely confused when it comes to scams… well, be confused no more! This handy guide will be covering a wide range of aspects about scams and should hopefully leave you well informed at the end of it. Here’s the main things we hope you’ll learn;

– Learn. We hope you’ll learn about what a scam is and the different types of scams there are.
– Detect. This guide will inform you of how to detect some of the scam ‘excuses’ used – e.g. “Sorry, I have to go!” (In this case, this is said just before a person is about to receive their prize.)
– Protect. You’ll hopefully learn how to protect against certain scams on the hotel!

Right, let’s get started!

Learn

What is a scam?! A scam is when your account details/credits/furni are conned out of you and ‘fed’ to another person. This can be achieved in many ways including trickery.

A hack and a scam are the same thing surely? Incorrect. A hack is when your account details/credits/furni are taken by brute force – you have very little control over a hack (i.e. keyloggers) unlike a scam.

Types of scam;

There are many types of scams on the hotel, some can no longer ‘work’ – e.g. the quick change scam, but others have been around for years and still are used today. Here are the common types of password scams:

E-mail scam. A user may receive an e-mail saying “… please email your user and password to ensure that we know this is your account”, this e-mail is usually claimed to be from Sulake staff, but is in fact from a scammer. Another common e-mail message is “Habbo now has a new site! Go to www.____.com and enter in your normal login details!”, this is an example of a phishing attempt. The link may lead to a website which infects your computer with malicious malware, or may contain a keylogger.

Password change scam. A user may be told be another person – “Want free credits?! Then please tell us your account details by filling in the following code 435644#<your username here>6543534#<your current password>34244542#<amount of credits you want>353358#!” The user will fill in the information and press ‘send’ or ‘accept’ and will later find that their account has been accessed, and their password changed. Another way this scam works is by a scammer saying “Hey, change your pass to ‘newpassword’ and you get free coins!”, If the user changed their pass to ‘newpassword’ then the scammer accesses their account.

Password censor scam. A fairly common but simple scam. If a user says “Omg, if you say your password, it gets filtered! Look – *******” some users might fall for this and type out their password… realising that the scammer was lying.

Here are the common types of furniture/credit scams:

Duplication scam. Some users may promise that they can duplicate your furniture or credits if you give the furni/credits to them. This is untrue and impossible, there is no way to duplicate an item.

Giveaway scam. Some giveaways – especially ‘3 respect, 1 furni’ giveaways –  are untrustworthy and simply scams where the owner will ban you from the room once you ask for a furni.

Gaming scam. This is incredibly common due to moderators no longer banning people for scamming. If you p2s (pay to stay) or win a game, the host may pretend to give you the prize but actually ban you from the room or pickall the room and ‘run off’. In some cases, you may win a game and the host might say “Oh, I have to go -goes offline-“, this host is clearly not intending to give you your prize – this can also applies to casinos and grabbers. Finally. the host may ‘drag out’ giving you the prize – i.e. he/she pretends they have lost the furni for your prize and have to explore all their rooms for it.

Teleport scam. Fairly simple, a user may offer to sell you linking teleports – but he/she could place in a pair of non-linking teleports instead. This is one of the hardest scams to protect yourself against.

Here is the staff impersonation scam:

A user may pretend to be a moderator/hotel manager and demand either you give them your pass or furni/credits, they will usually threaten you with a ban if you don’t comply with their demands.

As you can see, there are a variety of scams!

Detect

There are a few ways to notice if you are about to be scammed in a game… you may have to look pretty closely for them:

– ‘Drag out’ – This is where the host of a game deliberately delays giving you the prize by a variety of excuses – e.g. “Oh brb a few minutes” or “I have to find the furniture”. 
– ‘Disappearing users’ – If users in the queue/doorway start disappearing rapidly and you have just won the game, this could be suggesting that the owner is banning all the non-players… it won’t necessarily mean this all the time though.
– ‘Quiet host’ – Sometimes, the owner will become suspiciously quiet towards the end of a game, this may suggest that the owner is about to fake a disconnection (d/c) or a ban. This is not always the case though.
– ‘Scam rooms’ – Ah, don’t you just love them. If you search a person’s name you can see if any users have created scam rooms for that person. Not many people create scam rooms these days and they can easily be removed if a person sends a report about them to a moderator.

Protect

Luckily, there are a few ways to protect against scams!!! Here they are;

– Don’t p2s (pay to stay) too much – it may sound ridiculous,but it is recommended you don’t p2s (pay to stay) too much,this is because 1) you will probably not get your ‘money’s worth) in the prize and 2) if the game is indeed a scam, all that furniture will be given in vain.
– Don’t bet too much! – Yet again, it may sound silly, but do not bet too much in casinos. The amount of people who say “bet 10t” is insane, if you wish to take that risk – it’s your choice – but you may regret it if it turns out to be a scam.
– Remember there is ONLY 1 way to get free credits – no, this isn’t some rogue website you can use. It’s on the legitimate Habbo ‘credit offers’ page, that is the only way to get free credits (yes, some people may donate – but this is extremely rare.)

– Do not visit ‘suspicious sounding’ or retro sites – The majority of these sites will contain hidden viruses and keyloggers which can ruin your computers system, and gain account details to nearly everything (inc. Habbo.)
– Take friends with you into grabbers/casinos – If you have 2 or 3 friends with you inside a grabber/casino, the owner is less likely to scam you because he/she wouldn’t want to be noticed for scamming by your friends and he wouldn’t particularly want to lose potential ‘customers’.
– Friend request people in giveaways – to ensure that a ‘3 respect, 1 furni’ giveaway isn’t a scam, it would be wise to send a friend request to a person further ahead in the queue. That way, you can check if that person was banned or not!

– Delete rogue e-mails and block senders – 1.3 trillion spam e-mails were sent last year, and a sizeable portion of those contained links to harmful sites. If you delete these e-mails and block the senders, you will gain better protection against recurring incidents.
– Never fully trust anyone – If there is 1 piece of advice I could give, it would be to never trust anyone 100%. Even someone who you may consider a best-friend can be one of the most untrustworthy people you ever meet. It’s very pessimistic, but it’s true.

* Green = least useful advice & Red = most helpful advice!
** You cannot protect against the ‘teleporter scam’… it’s a matter of whether you are willing to risk it.

There you have it, a simple guide on scams! We hope you enjoyed browsing it and we hope that you’re now fully educated in how to avoid the deepest, darkest scams of Habbo hotel (they’re probably hid in the basement!) So remember to stay safe!