World of Warcraft Account Hackers
Has your World of Warcraft account been hacked? Information regarding why hackers are targeting users so aggresively and what you can do to prevent it.
If you play World of Warcraft, chances are you know someone that’s been hacked, that someone may even be you. Far too many World of Warcraft accounts are being hacked these days. Once a malicious person has control of your account, it’s going to be a major headache getting control back. Oftentimes compromised accounts are used for malicious purposes, and eventually end up getting banned by Blizzard. I have heard many stories of players discovering a hacker transferred characters to other realms, or deleted characters all together. I’ve heard of hackers stealing guild officer’s accounts, then stealing tens of thousands of gold from the guild bank, along with all items of value, and eventually removing everyone else from the guild. If you are hacked, you can be sure all your personal gold and items of value are gone.
Why is this happening?
It’s simple really, money. Odds are you have seen the very annoying spam messages from gold sellers offering to sell gold. Where do you think this gold comes from? That’s right, compromised accounts. For many reasons, you should never, ever buy gold. Doing so is cheating, it’s wrong, it’s against the EULA you agreed to, but if that doesn’t matter to you this should: you’re helping perpetuate the problem. As long as there are customers willing to buy gold, there will be hackers stealing accounts and their associated gold and items. If you have ever bought gold you are helping the problem. Just don’t do it, ever.
What can we do about the hackers?
All users need to be vigilant. Blizzard has said repeatedly they will never, ever ask for your user name or password by any means other than the game login and Blizzard website login forms. If you release your password to anyone via email, or via a non Blizzard website, you are going to get hacked. If you receive a suspicious email asking for your username and password, often looking similar to a Blizzard email and often threatening account closure if you do not comply, IT IS A SCAM. Do not ever give your account name and/or password to anyone, even if they claim to be from Blizzard. If you are ever in doubt, call Blizzard and ask for the authenticity of the email/website.
Goldfarmers, you say? i tought they made money by doing professions like mining auctioning and selling. And i have red an article in Humo (dutch TV- journal) that gold farmers work for maffia.
This has happened to my son today he has been playing this game since 2006 and it’s the first time we have had trouble, what is more worrying for me is that no one is picking up the phone at the other end and the more time passes the more worried I am getting, plus it is me and my bank account details that pay for this service. Plus we have paid them for extra security, the name of which escapes me right now.(authentic…..something or other it’s called)
I have read heaps of stuff about this today and I am not happy with the way that Blizzard deal with this type of behaviour by some.
Fair enough they restore everything to the normal or near normal, but there must be a better way of protecting their gamers, who PAY for the game. The key word being PAY.
This isn’t a free service Blizzard make a fortune from us all and should be doing more to protect people, especially the younger gamers.
Thank you for this article, I will try to get back to you and let you know what has happened to my son, but in all honesty I doubt he will want to play this any more as he is deeply upset and feels that it is too much trouble trying to deal with it.
We have been trying to get through to the phone lines since 9:30am and it is now 15:10pm with still no sign of them picking up at the other end.
Julia
I should say that we live in the UK, which will explain the time differrence. While the number we are trying to phone is a free number, my time is not and the time I am putting into hanging on a phone wire, means I am loosing money as I am self employed. Most of my day has been wasted trying to restore what was my sons in the first place
My account has been compromised about 1000000 times. Whoever is doing this knows exactly what they’re doing and they’re good at it. I have Avast, Bit Defender, and Spybot Search And Destroy and run scans literally every day but yet I still can’t stop them. Obviously I’m no computer genius so I don’t know what else to do other than reformat my computer. Even that I don’t want to do. There’s a lot of work in reformatting. Well at least I think so. LOL. Every time my account has been compromised, I log back on and so many items are missing that my character isn’t even playable. So far Blizzard has been able to restore everything for me. I don’t buy gold or buy power leveling services and I don’t go to random websites just downloading everything. As of now, the game isn’t even worth me playing anymore because of this issue. I’m on the losing side of this battle against the hackers/keyloggers. Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
@Tim
Reformat then try again with a new account.
If it still happens, then not sure what next.
Julia-
How has your son’s account been ‘hacked’? How do you know that it has been, I mean?
My son account was hacked also. He swears he hasn’t done anything unusual or given out or typed password anywhere. I have run antivirus software and combed through the logs…watched all of the processes running on my machines, nothing suspicious…I was hoping I could find something that would explain how this happened.