The vast majority of chinese gold farmers and dealers are working "legitamitely" in the sense that they aren't involved in hacking individuals' accounts. Rather, hundreds of thousands of mostly young men work upwards of seventy hours a week farming instances and selling their wares on the AH to meet daily gold quotas, the sum total of which is then given over to a dealer to sell to North American and European players.

Also, recognize that the only way they can farm the gold in the first place is to do so on North American servers. Chinese gold farmers who service North Americans play on our servers and pay our subscription fees; they aren't going away even if Chinese WoW servers dissapear.

To sean...

That's simply not true. It's propganda put out by the gold-sellers, to make people feel it's ok to buy gold. I'll bet you read it in an article profiling one of the companies involved, or one of the employees. Of course they're not going to admit they're hackers.

90% of the gold bought and sold for real world money is stolen from hacked accounts.