Nothing like being hacked and receiving a suspension to boot.
I’d assumed Blizzard would have removed my ban by now, but I suppose their support queue must be pretty long at the moment.
Just to recap, here’s a quick rundown of what’s taken place up until now…
My 2v2 partner, fellow officer and core raider of our guild, not only had his account ransacked by hackers, but they went so far as to delete his mains. I mean… c’mon… Once you get all of the riches, what’s the point in actually deleting the characters, apart from pure asshattery (new word btw)..?!
Shortly after this event, I posted the news here on the site. It was mainly me venting about this injustice, but I also wanted to get reader opinion about enhancing my own security. The response was a resounding yes when asked if I should definitely look into an authenticator. So, I went ahead and bought one.
Prior to this, I had previously thought an authenticator was a needless device for us Mac users.
/facepalm
I certainly found out the hard way, that Macs are not invulnerable to compromises.
Anyway, I went ahead and ordered the authenticator. Well guess when it showed up..?
About 6 hours after I was hacked. Isn’t that somethin’..?!
I was hacked between approximately 4am and 5am this past Friday morning. The authenticator arrived in the mail at about 10:45am.
Four plus years of non-compromised WoW activity, only to result in a hack and ban, only after I finally decide to bump up security. Unreal…
The reason I was banned is because the hacker was flagged for excessive trading of in-game gold between accounts. Obviously, they were using my character as a mule of some sort. Perhaps they weren’t too bright about it, I dunno. That was maybe my saving grace though, because it led to Blizzard immediately shutting down my account and hopefully preventing them from doing further damage.
Needless to say, Blizzard was unable to remove my suspension even after they learned of what happened, so they stuck me in a queue along with however many others in a similar boat. So, here I sit… hacked and banned, through no fault of my own… *sniff*
I have no idea what awaits me once I do finally log in. All I know is that they lightened the load in our guild bank somewhat, but thankfully didn’t get anything of substantial value. Our GM was cautious enough to limit withdrawls of the guild’s most precious items to only the banker and himself. Smart move.
It’s not like I’m over here twitching or anything because I can’t log in, but it sure does suck. I mean, I’ve taken a few weeks off here and there before with no problem, but these circumstances just plain suck.
The night before my hacking I respecced to Marksmanship for PvP. I was looking to have some fun with the spec, write up a guide and work on some MM Power Auras. That was my plan for this past weekend. I was foiled!
Well, my 72 hours should be up shortly, so I suppose tomorrow will be the moment of truth. I really hope I get all my stuff back. 😕
UPDATE: Since I knew Garwulf was still relatively intact, I didn’t really concern myself with looking up any of my other toons on the armory. Well, tonight I did. It seems as if they deleted my 80 Death Knight and 74 Druid. Those fargin’ iceholes..!
This site helped me out a lot with getting my system secure
and also has info on account recovery.
Lots of link to blizzard support pages for account
security and links to articles.
wowaccounthacked.com
Has anyone had experience getting any of the rare epic pets back from the trading card game?? Got Hacked and they deleted all of my alts, including my Hyppogryph Hatchling. I am hoping Blizz will just give it back to me on my main instead of the alt it got deleted on. It isnt farmable (without spending like 500 real dollars) so I will be furious if I dont get him back.
At least when they restored some of the lost stuff on my main they gave me 10,000g that I supposedly lost. I only had 500g on the char when it got hacked. I guess 10,000g is an okay payoff for dealing with the frustration. That is if I get my Hyppogryph back lol.
Hey all, someone hack in my account, sold all from guild bank, and all from my bank and bags, took all gold…And im suspended for 72 hours…Dunno why…Any I cant find my Main or alt character on wowarmory….main Jabbah nice gear a lot of time spend on it ,will i get him back?
Yes, you will Jabbah. It may take a week or so, but Blizzard will get your characters and all of your stuff restored. It took them nearly eight days to complete my restore, but in the end I was right back where I was before the hack.
Your characters were likely either deleted or transferred and renamed. That is why they’re not coming up in an armory search. The reason you were banned is because Blizz flagged you as a gold trader while they were muling your riches between accounts. Same thing happens to most hacking victims these days.
The ban sucks, I know, but that should get removed 72hrs exactly from the time you were hacked.
You’ll get all of your chars and things back, so just be patient. And get an authenticator if you don’t have one already!
That’s why I don’t play on retail servers anymore. Blizzard doesn’t give a toss about its customers. Now I play for free and the GM’s actually answer you. Amazing from a free server.
I am so sorry to hear that happened to you. It’s truly horrible how bad hacking has gotten lately. I know someone who has been waiting over a month to get restored now and still isn’t getting much back at a time. It was really bad on his stuff as the actual hackers had ordered restores on his chars then went and vended/sold everything again!
Also, I caught the sob while doing dealings with my bank char in SW… They are not hard to spot (actually Extremely easy!) and after I ticketed the GM I got a reply back within 20 minutes and got him banned. Since then I have also caught 2 more doing the same exact thing, and I pray they read this and change the way they are doing it, for right now, it’s easy pickings for catching hackers.
I was hacked on Mon May 10 and have since gone through the Blizzard customer fail system. I was patient and waited 7 days and woke up on day 7 to find they finally got around to suspending the account for the hackers activity the week before. My account was unlocked couple days later, still no restoration…now Im send to an elusive “specialist” whom cannot seem to be contacted in any way. Blizzards customer service is a joke and I wouldnt be the least bit suprised to hear they have something to due with the huge increase in hacked accounts. 7 bucks X Millions? Thats a lotta dimp.
Even if you had lost all your pets, the GM’s give them back to you. My old GM had a pet called Kevin (You may know him better as Nuramoc). She abandoned it but a few weeks later, regreted it… she could tame it back as everytime she went to do so, he was dead. So she ticketed a GM and to her surprise… ‘We found him hiding in the corner of the stables, we lured him out with some food’ was the response 😛
Hi Garwulf,
Been reading your site for probably a year now, and you certainly seem to know your stuff. I can’t imagine you’d fall for an obvious phishing trick. Any idea yet how they got your password? I play on a Mac too (iMac 24″ running Snow Leopard). I wasn’t aware of any keyloggers on the Mac, and I’m pretty careful about clicking on suspicious weblinks or anything that asks for my password. I always double check that I’m on a real Blizzard website before I do type it in. But it seems if you can get hacked, anyone can. I guess there’s really no excuse not to get an authenticator now…
I think it’s to the point where Blizz should just include an authenticator with the software. I know of quite a few people in my guild that have been hacked over the past year or so and every one of them ow uses an authenticator. They haven’t had any trouble since.
Both my 2v2 partner and I are both in the dark as to what lead to the account compromise. Neither one of us shares account info and I for one am very careful about what links I click on, either on the web or in e-mails.
One possible theory that was presented my a fellow gamer, is that I may have had my password “scraped”. In the wake of my buddy’s hacking, I changed my password twice out of paranoia. Unfortunately, the second PW I chose was a former one I’d been using a few months back. From what I’ve been told, it’s possible the hackers may have ascertained my PW previously, but didn’t get to hacking me then. Reverting back to it may have alerted them that I was using old account info which they had knowledge of. I dunno… it’s possible, but who knows.
My advice to anyone now is, why take a chance… get an authenticator.
Oooo, that’s rough buddy. I’m sorry that had to happen. I remember once, one of my guild-mates got hacked. For about three hours before we found out, the hacker was sitting on our private channel watching us talk…I was sure he was just making a list of who to get next.
Take heart, my friend! Blizz fixes all things in time…
i sure hope they didn’t abandon all your rare pets to i cant imagine having to go after king krush and loquenahak again not to mention your spirit guide wolf which you cant evan tame any more hopefully blizzard would restore them as well
You think like I do.
Luckily, the first huge sigh of relief was seeing my Spirit Guide at login, then later seeing all of my pets in the stable.
I actually hadn’t thought about that until last night when I saw that 2 of my characters had been deleted. The thought of losing my ghost wolf almost made me sit up in bed.
I’ll be posting an update to this topic later tonight.
Been thinking about why they delete toons, its most likely to make more work for the GM’s. The more they are working on reactive stuff, like restoring accounts, the less proactive they can be about investigating hacks that are currently happening. Basically they are keeping constant pressure on blizzard. Honestly, blizzards should remove the option to mail gold between accounts, and that would fix this. Heck even remove COD sales and such… yes it would be an inconvenience to have to use /2 for actual trade.. but well it could work. Or make the time delay for mailing items / gold increase with the value of the item / gold.. 0-100g takes 1-2 hours.. 1k+ aggregate gold (so even if multiple mails), takes 2 days. They would then be able to stop a LOT of this stuff in its tracks.
Wow, those are brilliant ideas!
I’ve often wondered why they delete toons as well. Many think it’s just to be a d-bag, but I figured there was another reason. These guys do this as a business, so I assume there’s some underlying reason that’s more significant than just being malicious. I think you’re probably right about keeping Blizzard buried with account restores and such. Makes sense to me.
I also like your proposed idea about enforcing a time limit on x-account gold x-fers. If I recall correctly, wasn’t it that way before? That would really make things difficult for hackers. It would pretty much limit them to inactive accounts, since they usually only have a one to two hour window to conduct their dastardly deeds.
My deleted toons came back to me. The wait is long… I know. Sucks.