Blizzard is stepping up its fight against unauthorized gold selling in its flagship MMORPG, World of Warcraft (WoW). Blizzard has now asked PayPal to close the account of gold selling offenders over "intellectual properties violations" reports Curse. According to the report, PayPal has notified a number of major gold reseller sites that use the service that if they do not cease selling WoW gold that they risk having their PayPal accounts cancelled.

PayPal is a highly used service for moving in-game currency for real world cash and WoW makes up a huge part of the RMT market. This move could have a rather catastrophic affect on the gold selling industry as a whole because some speculate that even if those services were to move directly to using credit or debit cards that Blizzard could potentially make the same argument to the bank being used and possibly shut those down as well.

Blizzard has defended their intellectual property vigorously over the years, winning lawsuits against gold sellers and even being awarded a rather hefty sum from an unauthorized pirate server operator. How this latest move will impact the RMT industry has yet to be seen, so stay tuned and we'll update you when we have more.

(via Curse)