TIL that Blizzard sued a woman running her own private WoW server, in which she sold items through PayPal, for $88,594,539.00 and won. from todayilearned

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/08/the-88-million-server-private-wow-server-op-loses-big/

The company was called Scape Gaming, and the server was called WoWScape.
I played on it back in the day, and it was a Burning Crusade private server.

Essentially how she made money is by selling gear within the game,
although it was called “donating” to support the server. Every time you
did this you would be contacted in game by an official Donation GM who
would teleport you to them, lock them in place and check your order.
Once they verified everything they would add the items into your
inventory using some commands and teleport you back into town so you
could go on your merry way. These items ranged from custom gear created
by the developers working on the server, mounts, reagents, anything you
could possibly want really. The custom gear was the most expensive and
if I remember correctly a full set of the gear for one spec cost around
$300. You could pay $1000~ or some ridiculous amount to get all of the
custom sets.

This server ran for many years and constantly had several thousands of
people playing at once throughout multiple servers. The owner, Peyton,
actually bought a house with the money.

https://www.gamingreality.com/2010/08/wowscape-seued-by-blizzard-for-88.html?m=1

It is sad when you have to lie about being a co-operator of a p-server that me and other devs were apart of. We closed it up. The population was dwindling and we had real life issues to take care of. Running wowscape became a failing hassle with few donations and servers cost exceeding what we were able to afford. This isn’t wowscape. Wowscape was closed down and had a graceful run. Don’t fall victim thinking this is the same server as before. They are reusing the name.

I played on 2008 really cool server