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Epic Customer Service...lol
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I used to shake my head at all the people thinking WoW wasn't secure, or that somehow Bllizzard was partly at fault. No more. My account, which I haven't logged into since Sept. '09 was hacked May 20. The only way I even knew it was compromised was because they attempted to change the password. They couldn't log into my email, so they couldn't change it. None of my CC have any charges on them, and my bank account is safe. Had they not made that mistake they could play it forever, as I don't intend to come back.
Hmm, if I had a keylogger what would be their number one priority? My bank account and credit cards, or gold farming on a hacked account? Seems obvious which one is going to net a lot of cash instantly.
Anyways, take it for what its worth.
I got the last laugh, though. As soon as the Authenticator was deactivated they put on I logged in, and they were gold-farming in Sethhk Halls(whatever name it is). He was in the middle of the boss fight when I booted him. I remember when I last played I barely had any gold. Now, my guy has 4500 gp. I'm going to give it to a guildie. Also, he upped my enchanting to 352. I fully expect this toon to be banned for god only knows what sort of hacking these guys do when they compromise an account.
So you have proof that Blizzard got caught with rotating ads of the wrong sort (the users still had to click on these ads btw), people leave companies under a cloud (shocker!) and a couple of people got hacked??? Where the hell does any of that prove that Blizzards 'customer account' security was compromised and that employees leaving the company are thieves by a 'human nature' default???
Am i saying that Blizzard is perfect, no! Am i saying that security 'cannot' be compromised at all, no!! But i am also not running around screaming 'FIRE, FIRE' just because there is a box of matches in the corner of the room!!!
If you want to talk human nature, is it also possible that some people may look for any other possible explanation for them being hacked other than it being their own fault whether by accident or naivety??
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I gave you proof that Blizzard is in fact responsible for the hackings of many accounts due to security breaches. You refuse to believe it when it is shown quite clearly to be an irrefutable fact. Please, just give up. You cannot win this argument on a forum not ran by Blizzard.
You gave us proof that people can be hacked by third parties, which i believe whole heartedly, i have no argument with you on that one, take whatever 'victory' you would like.
What i was interested in was all these posts that claim that blizzard has released customer information either by a total lack of customer account security or because it was stolen by these apparent 'thief' job leavers, on that front i have seen nothing! I have seen a lot of theory, conjecture and total insults aimed at ex-employees, but none of that adds up to 'proof' in any sense of the word!
People who have seen my posts in the past will know all too well that i will gladly say when i am wrong if someone proves their point either by cogent argument or solid evidence, but i have seen neither up to now.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I would say Blizzard customer service is some of the worst out there, compared to how much money thay make, you should think thay could develop a system that works when their customers get problems.
Read the articles, the CMs hacked accounts posted keyloggers on the official forums, and the ads hosted also contained keyloggers.
In addition, the CMs accounts being hacked (at blizzard's OFFICE, I may add) is used as proof that Blizzard has had their system hacked in the past.
Finally, if you really, really wish to believe that Blizzard is unhackable..when the government is hacked on a monthly basis, then I really can't help you overcome your naivete. Blizzard is a target for hackers, as statistically speaking, WOW accounts can be stripped and sold for more than the average credit card can before it is locked down.
Its not like every single other major MMO dev hasnt been targetted by hackers of some sort...
Lineage? Godmode hackers with GM powers destroyed the subscription numbers overnight.
FFXI? DDoS attacks from disgruntled RMT.
WOW? Hit by forums ads containing keyloggers, CMs HACKED from BLIZZARD"S OWN HQ. tens of thousands of account thefts. If you really think none of these events are related in any way, you should get some sun, read a newspaper, maybe take some IT classes.
OP said he had about 2million gold cleaned out, what the heck? Is that even possible, maybe for a gold seller.
11million players or so, it isn't hard to sit at the login screen and try guess common login and passwords. Plus the amount phishing going on and other stuff it doesn't surprise me, most accounts are not hacked in the respectable term Hacked, but are mearly guessed or attained by phishing.
Possible assuming many characters to hold it, abuse of early game bugs, and the ability to control a server's economy. Also, a good deal of exaggeration on the Op's part. Probably was closer to 1 million. I could see someone making 1million gold in a year.
I have been in the IT industry in development and support for 20 years, but i am always willing to learn more.
Please just carefully read what you have posted again and 'please' show me where in any of it, it actually 'proves' that customer accounts have been compromised??? Have i said that accounts 'could not' be compromised at all, no! What i have said is that i still haven't seen any proof that customer account security 'has' been compromised.
From a systems perspective, there is a marked difference between someone having their office logon compromised and a few posts made on forums containing links, then making the leap to compromised customer accounts. Everything you have described so far is 'third party' related, which we all know happens and nothing to do with customer accounts being hacked directly at the Blizzard end!
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Yes I had over 2 milion gold cleaned out from my account. It is entirely possible, and no I am not a gold farmer or gold seller. I started playing when WoW was in closed beta all the way through to last february. I was just very good at making gold in the game. The guild I ran had tons of people really happy with some of the methods I shared with them at the time on how to make gold quickly. The max on gold is far more then 2 millino btw.
That wasn't the point I was trying to make though, I was just saying I was very cautious of my account all the way up to when I quit playing. Then over a year later my account gets hacked. Okay so however it happened, I don't really care. Lack of security at blizzard, a keylogger got on to my machine, unlikely but possible...the issue was the customer service in trying to get my account back to what it was, and then being able to play again if I chose to. Currently I still can not get through to a live rep at Blizzard, so I guess I won't be going back anytime soon. Oh well. I was just really disappointed that the CSRs can't help me if I did want to go back.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
well man at least they emailed you back, my account got hacked on WoW and 3 days after emailing them no response and also have called over a dozen times with the high call volume crap. But what can you do i guess...
File a complaint with the better business bureau, for starters. Tell the entire world how much Activision-Blizzard's customer service fails at serving? Tons of things you can do that will hurt them where there heads are..which is in their pocketbooks.
Your account will be suspended and the gold taken away. If you give it to someone, thier account will likely suffer the same.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Yeh I got an email back but for them to unsuspend my account , they said I need to speak to a live rep. If I can't ever get a hold of a live rep then I can never get my account cleared up so I can reactivate it again. It's not a big deal really as I don't think really think I will enjoy playing again, but I have wondered sometimes if it would be fun..
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
Normally I don't react to individual posters. But I don't believe the loss of 2 million gold the OP is talking about either.
I want to point out to other participants of this thread that the OP states above (in the blue) he was playing WOW from Beta "all the way through to last february..." to motviate his "gold".
While in his OP he mentions he didn't even play the game in the last year. When he wanted to return - after more than a year - he found his account hacked (and the loss of his "2 million gold").
Just an example of how rare a sum of 1 million Wow gold really is (that's half the amount he mentions), one can see in this recent article:
http://www.wow.com/2010/05/12/the-classifieds-one-million-gold-in-his-pocket/
As even the timing of his playing was not correctly mentioned in both posts, it is obvious other "details" about the OP's statements are not quite clear either.
It lets me conclude the OP is a rather smart set up of someone who "inflated" a lot of other information to what purpose exactly ?
Its embarrassing when an NPC compliments you in an MMo, the only relevant, cool and epic things come from players whispering you Grtz, mate, we did it. copyright Pilnkplonk
I think yes.
I get phishing mails for WoW on few mailboxes that aren't connected in any way to MMO. Probably come from mail-bots digging through various gaming related sites/forums, those sites selling email or even are just picked randomly.
You need to understand that employee that leaks that kind of info is going to be in deep shit if Blizzards finds him out, considering they lose real money on every hacked account (restoring those takes time and manpower). Sure someone may slip few emails without Blizzard noticing, but leak on that scale you are suggesting would be definitely dealt fast and hard.
This is not true, sorry. Sure they may see your account info, but there is no way for them to see your password.
How do you know it was at Blizzards office? CM have access to their account from home to, actually they post in their free time quite often. Anyways what this proves is only that some CM got sloppy and got hacked. You know stuff like this happens, it's really hard not to get hacked when you are being targeted specifically and considering what his hacked account was used for it was probably targeted attack. There is ton of cases like this, HL2 source being stolen right from valve servers via elaborate attack that took weeks if i remember correctly, Lineage 2 server code leak etc etc.
Sure there is always room for improvement and Blizzard probably isn't most secure company but believe me im sure they are doing their best considering each hacked account is real pain in the ass for them:
-money spend on customer support,
-bad reputation,
-some customers just plain leaving,
-cc charge-backs etc (they usually reactivate hacked acc with stolen cc)
Think logically, game accounts aren't really hacked by some hardcore criminals, just some RMT companies / farmers. Stealing bank info and using it is serious crime in most countries, while stealing game account is probably not.
Edit: Stupid editor deleting quotes on modification
Okay, so you don't believe I had over 2 million gold, I don't really care. Had I known that was going to be the issue of discussion then I would not have included it. I was not trying to brag that I had more gold then some people, and I actually do know a few other people that played on my server that had more then me. The only reason I was stating that I played from closed beta going forward, is that I had played a long time and had figured out ways to aquire vast amounts of gold during the time I played. Part of it was just knowing what to gather, using the auction house and just straight up grinding on certain mobs over time and several other methods too.. Obviously things changed as patches and expansions came out. If you were reallly good at aquiring gold in the game as changes were made and new content was pushed out, you knew how to make the most of it. A lot of methods were figured out by various people, some of it can be seen on Youtube in how to get valuable items that were worth a lot. By the time these methods were posted though, most of the people who did them already had been doing so for months and made huge fortunes already. I would be willing to bet, there are some WoW players that read this discussion and have even more gold then what I mentioned. After me getting grief about it, insuating I am lying or exaggerating, I doubt anyone will post to it, but whatever, I don't really care.
The whole point I was trying to make was that my account got stolen, everything was vendored/transferred off the account. Blizzard investigated, then restored my account, but did not remove the authenticator key from it. This required additional email contact between them and me. Once that was resolved there was a reverse of payment from whatever credit card the account thief used which put a negative balance on my account, which again required more email back and forth and finally resulting in the fact for me to clear it up, I need to contact a live representative over the phone which to no success I have not been able to get a hold of them.
Also sorry if I was incorrect on dates, I was referring to quitting WoW as of february of 2009, Sorry I did not make that clear!!!!!
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
You stated you played WOW...
"From Beta to last February" and this could be read as a reference to Feb 2010.
But secondly, if you DID quit in Feb 2009, it would have been impossible to gather 2.000.000 Gold in TBC and the first 3 months of WotlK.
As the inflation simply prohibited this kind of amount in TBC to be gathered by normal play.
One person that did gather 1.000.000 Gold in Wotlk recently had a full article on wow.com devoted to him in May 2010 and the article mentioned he auctioned around 1500 items per day on the AH just to get to that amount in WotlK. Meaning the player was purely playing the present economical game in a straight single focused manner.
And you did it all in TBC with ... half of the present day resources and inflation...and double the money.
It makes your posts even more curious and making "the focus point" and "Blizzard restoring problems" even more questionable to anyone reading the complaints.
I have no problem understanding you have a problem with Blizzard, I am just not convinced we see the correct and whole picture anyway.
Its embarrassing when an NPC compliments you in an MMo, the only relevant, cool and epic things come from players whispering you Grtz, mate, we did it. copyright Pilnkplonk
ok this just gets worse...
So they finally respond to my email saying I need to email the billing email but I looked at where I sent it and I sent it to the [email protected]... Also I tried to call the number and it says line has disconnected. Wtf blizzard stop kicking my ass!
Actually, read tha article completely, he did 1 million in 6 months...at 40-60 minutes a DAY.
With 5-6 years at say. 6 hours a day, he could have easily made 2million. WOW came out around 2004. Seems the newbies have little idea how old this game truly is.
Edited for numerical typos.
That is why you should not use the same email account to register your battle.net as well as MMORPG, curse, WoWhead and porn.
I use one email account for every kind of forum registration, including MMORPG. Every day I receive phish mail about every game on earth, tell me my Aion account is hack, asking me to confirm my coga master registration, saying my WoW account is suspended. Interestingly, I do not play most of those games, and for those I play I register with another account, one that is not used for anything else except that game. AND, one email account per game.
Authenticators ends all dangers of being hacked. Unless the hacker can land their hands on your autthenticator, you account cannot be stolen. Just a gentle reminder, if you lose your authenticator, all hell broke loose.
Everyone is free to form their own opinions. But please refrain from passing opinion off as fact. There's enough honest misinformation floating around- none of us need the intentional kind.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
If I am Blizzard, I would hesitate to restore that account.
The OP could easily be the hacker himself, hacking himself, selling the gold, and petitioning Blizz to restore the gold so he can sell again. Hell, no. I will take a lot of steps investigating the issue before even thinking of handing out 2 million gold to someone who could easily be the gold seller himself.
I also noted that the user OP has deleted his account here. Looks funny ehh?
Same thing happened here. I left the game, my account got hacked. I put in a complaint etc.... and they supposedly restored it, just to learn it's completely messed up. Put in call after call, and many emails but in the end it all came wrong. Horrible customer service, absolutely awful. I will never go back now.
How am I passing opinion as a fact? You know how it is possible to steal an account covered by an authenticator? If not, it is you who throws up baseless fantasy around as it you know something I do not.
Banks use the same key to protect online banking. While theoretically it is still possible to randomly generate that code through brute force, is is well neigh impossible to do that within 30 seconds. Prove your case or stop pretending I am proven wrong with anything solid.