FFFFF. Someone hacked my WoW account.

[Taboo]

I was able to get my activation key and get back in and change my passwords, but not before some asshole deleted and/or sold everything off of my characters.

UGH. My friend had to call me when I'd only had two hours of sleep and wake me up to deal with this shit. NOT how I wanted to spend my morning... emailing back and forth with Blizz.

[AdminAssistant]

I'm so sorry! Hopefully Blizzard will be able to restore your characters; they're pretty good about that kind of thing.

[Taboo]

I hope so too.

I'm just going to feel really crappy if it takes a while because just last night I made a bunch of gear for a guildie who's about to hit 80, and now they're going to have to wait on that too. =(

[MaggieTheCat]

My account was hacked recently and Blizz was really good about getting my stuff back pretty fast. I think I realized what had happened on a Friday and started contacting them, and by the following Tuesday or Wednesday I had my stuff back (I don't think they did anything over the weekend, so I guess it was like 2-3 business days.)

Sorry to hear it happened to you. Hope you get all your stuff back soon!

[lordlundar]

well, you've taken care of the repair work, now you just need to make sure it doesn't happen again. That said, I'm going to recommend, and odds are you've had at least a dozen people tell you this already:

Get an authenticator tied to your account. Yes, it requires that you pay extra to get one (provided you don't have a smartphone and don't want to use the new dial up system), but to be honest, when you consider how much you lose and how long it takes to get everything restored, it's worth it. A number of the scam emails mention that if there's an authenticator tied tot he account, not to bother replying. That's because they can't do anything without it.

As well, do a system scrub. The person got your account info somehow, and it's usually a keylogger. Find it and eliminate it. Check your email as well for odd emails you might have replied to. Remember, Blizzard will NEVER ask you for account sensitive information such as a password.

[Aethian]

He'll I got hacked even with anauthenticator. Still trying to get my account back.

[Amina516]

That SUCKS!

I had a friend get hacked. Blizz did jack shit.

I hope they help you out.

[Taboo]

WOAH. Fastest account restoration EVER (around 2 hours)!!!

I got most of my stuff back. Missing about 500g and they soulbound a piece of gear to me that was made for a friend, but that's fixable. Woohoo!

I have an authenticator shipping to me right now, I changed all my email passwords etc and am going to do a bunch of scans on the comp later. I ran Windows XP in a virtual machine the other day and it probably doesn't have all of the security stuff updated as I run it about once in a blue moon, so I'm wondering if that was what did it.

[Kaylyn]

I just checked my spam folder to see if I had any scam emails. I had two, one that seemed to originate from my own account, and another from a fake Blizzard email. One was warning me that my account had JUST been tracked doing real money tranasactions and had been suspended for 19 HOURS. Odd, as that account's been inactive for a few months now. And I didn't see anywhere where it asked me to not bother replying if I had an authenticator, which I do.

On another note, found my first Nigerian scam email!

[Gravekeeper]

There's one going around, email wise, that looks exactly like a Battle Net Account Change Notice. But the included link goes elsewhere of course. The urls always start with battle.net. But they're really battle.net-support.com or something similar.

I get it every other week or so. =p

But yeah, it has to have been a keylogger or an email.

[Kaylyn]

Yeah, I got one of those too. Even had proper grammar and everything!

It said my battle.net email address had been changed. To my other email address.

I checked the hotmail address and it had the same email, asking me to click on the link (which I didn't). So I went to the WoW website, tried to log in...and at first it didn't take my login info. Scared me to death, but I reentered it (I think I left off my traditional number trailer the second time) and it went through.

I wonder how safe that stuff is to click on when you use Firefox with script blockers and TrendMicro. Because I've always been curious as to how easy it is to fall for, but always been too scared to click on anything.

[wraiths_crono]

That does suck, glad it was restored fast. I do have the authenticator on my Ipod touch and haven't had any hack attempts (knock on wood). Those fake emails I love them because I work for a company that has ways of tracking the exact owners, then i send them a nice email from our ticket system warning them and some other nice phrases.

[terakhan]

Had something similar with my Guild Wars account. I got distracted with life and wound up not playing it for almost a year. During that time, apparently it got hit by some gold seller site or another, but they caught and locked the account. Took me about a week of failed attempts to contact them (mostly due to using the wrong links on their support pages and their different support email names in Europe vs America), but got my account back, as close to 'as I remembered it' as I could say, given the time away.

Changed my email AND password ASAP, once I was back in the game.

For a little added security, what you might do is take advantage of Yahoo or another webmail's generosity, and have multiple accounts:
#1 strictly for gaming with reputable companies (ie Blizzard, and in my case NCSoft)
#2 personal important stuff/friends and such
#3 'trash can' email, for forum lurking, trying out new sites etc. Open nothing sent to THAT email except confirmation emails from sites that send them.

Keep the names memorable for you, but vastly different in order to not mix them in your head, and never use one for another's purpose. If you keep #1 and #2 private and only given to trustworthy individuals/companies, you will still get the occasional spam from a random email recipient generator, but those accounts will not be sold to scammers as targets, and those emails will be so obvious you won't even have to worry about opening the wrong email and getting a virus/keylogger from it.

Also, I don't know if WoW has such a thing, but if you can use methods to minimize your typing you can stop a some issues before they start. It would be risky if I didnt watch what I visited, but my GW shortcut has my password command-lined, and the game is set to remember my email and character name itself. So when I start the game, there is no loggable typing, just straight to the character select screen.

[RayvenQ]

There's one going around, email wise, that looks exactly like a Battle Net Account Change Notice. But the included link goes elsewhere of course. The urls always start with battle.net. But they're really battle.net-support.com or something similar.

I get it every other week or so. =p

But yeah, it has to have been a keylogger or an email.

Also, whenever you see a suspicious url, hover your mouse over it and it should show you at the bottom of your browser just exactly what that url actually is.

Also, if you're ever asked to verify your account details/password, that is fake, as Blizzard etc (the companies that run games like this etc) never ask for account details

[Taboo]

There's one going around, email wise, that looks exactly like a Battle Net Account Change Notice. But the included link goes elsewhere of course. The urls always start with battle.net. But they're really battle.net-support.com or something similar.

I get it every other week or so. =p

But yeah, it has to have been a keylogger or an email.

I'm leaning towards keylogger, because I haven't opened any email lately that wasn't directly from my school. Gonna do scans on the computer this weekend.

I'm generally good with this sort of stuff - don't open emails claiming to be from Blizzard unless I'm sitting there waiting for one; I just go log into my Battle.net account and check there to see if there's anything legit that needs to be dealt with. And I have my emails separated (school account, work account, personal account, internet/game signup account) though that's a really good tip. But oh well, with how often WoW accounts get hacked these days I guess it's not that surprising.