There are so many elements as to why this is such a lucrative trade, like established wow players auctioning (eBaying) their high leveled/powerfully equipped characters for real money (I saw one guy around a year ago selling 5 high levelled characters for the sum of ¡ê2,500). Many modification sites are succumbing to the keylogger scam and even the big ones such as Cursegaming.com I've heard are suffering. Also the vast majority of IE users who inadvertedly let in keylogging software due to the flaws in IE. Many places are making software suites so you can search for mods via the suite (such as wowgold1000) hopefully this will reduce the amount of hacked accounts.

As for the world of warcraft gold spam? WoW is a victim of it's own creation there. I remember when the main frustrations were the lag and server downtimes, now for many that would be preferred to the constant wow gold spam that you receive pretty much anywhere in Azeroth. Personally it doesn't bother me because I have Spamsentry. This has saved me from the constant barrage of idiocy that is wow gold spam.