Over 4000g Removed for nothing

Can you offer the name and realm of a character on the affected account, Carola? I'd like to look into this in a bit more detail. Thanks much. :)

I've given your friend the courtesy of rather thoroughly investigating the matter you've brought to our attention, Carola, and I must confess that I've encountered some inconsistencies between the story as you've told it — presumably after having it relayed to you by said friend — and what actually appears to have occurred. Allow me to pull the veil of obfuscation away from the circumstances, revealing them to the light of truth.

First and foremost, I've examined a weeklong period roughly coinciding with the happenstance about which you've lodged a complaint, and while I see your friend bidding on and buying out a number of auctions — for Enchanting materials, Cooking recipes, Arcane Tomes, and so forth — I can find no evidence whatsoever of his having created any auctions, for Primals or any other item, much less any auctions approaching a total of 4,000 gold. If your friend would be so kind as to offer an approximate timeframe during which this purportedly occurred, I'd be much obliged.

Curiously enough, what I did uncover in my research were several — how to put this delicately? — "exchanges" between your friend and a low-level character of what appears, if I'm speaking frankly, to be ill-repute. These negotiations (though difficult to decipher completely, as they were conducted primarily in broken English) seemed to be centred around gold being traded to your friend as part of a business transaction.

To that end, I found three occasions, between Oct. 17 and Oct. 20, on which varying sums of gold were conveyed between this or another low-level character (from context, apparently in cahoots with the first) and your friend, totaling approximately 2,800 gold. While it's true this doesn't precisely match the figure you've offered, it's possible that I failed to notice an exchange, or that — as is wont to happen — some exaggeration occurred on your friend's part. In any event, since we're dealing with large amounts of in-game currency, this information seems relevant.

Now, an unfortunate discovery was later made by our investigators — it seems, whether unbeknownst to your friend or not at the time, that the gold he received from these exchanges had ultimately been culled from compromised accounts, making him a benefactor from a malicious breach of our Terms of Use, if not complicit in the egregious acts themselves. While the connection between him and the unauthorised access was determined to be too tenuous for further repercussions to be levied against him, the ill-gotten gold was reappropriated accordingly.

I don't suppose your friend might have... misremembered the details of the matter? It would be an awful shame for misconstruction to occur. :)