Riot Goes After League of Legends Skin Scammers

Riot Blitzcrank and Arcade Hecarim are two of the promotional skins that I have in my League of Legends collection. If you want to own them and other rare skins, you have until July 23rd to provide proof of purchase and strut your stuff in the lanes of Summoner's Rift, Howling Abyss, Crystal Scar and Twisted Treeline.

As with any rare commodity, be it physical or digital, price is driven by demand. With that demand comes the 'savvy' people who feel they can exploit the system, Riot's League of Legends is no different. With codes fetching as much as $1000, the business model has finally become too much Riot.

Sites such as Lolking have given away their stash, acquired legally, but even they have run into issues. Codes being deactivated on the fly.

Because Riot is removing old skin codes, we have dozens to giveaway at LolKing. We'll be dumping them on Twitter and Facebook.

— Rhéa (@ashelia) July 10, 2014

There are sites, such as Lokskinshop.com, that sell these rare skins. How will they be affected? Their delivery method is via Skype, not exactly UPS standard.

Riot have issued the following statement.

These sites promise limited edition skins for League of Legends, when in reality they acquire codes illegitimately and exploit players. They charge excessive prices (we found one skin for over $1,000!) and sometimes take payment and never provide the content. You can’t predict the outcome, and no purchase is ever guaranteed regardless of what the seller says. To make matters worse these services typically use bots. Bots are lame to play with and chew up additional server bandwidth, negatively impacting everyone.”

“Riot is taking action against these scammers at the source. We are working with multiple payment processors to inform them of the situation and recommend they no longer process fraudulent payments from these sites. Additionally we will be deactivating all previously issued skin codes starting today. If you have a skin code that you acquired legitimately please send a request to Player Support and include proof of ownership. We’d be happy to help redeem the content to your account, but please note after 23/07/14 we will no longer be redeeming codes for any reason.

Have you run into a deactivated code issue? Have you paid over the odds for skin? How many hours do you play of League of Legends? Can Riot find a way to get these codes out to the masses without 'skin scammers' exploiting the system?