Banned – Blizzard Doesn’t Like You To Speak Your Mind

The “Black Project” sounds pretty far fetched but, someone selling email address lists, you bet. I made a brand new http mail address to register my account to when I 1st began playing wow. I’ve never used it for anything else and, it is not my default address and none of my own mail programs have the address in them.

When I started getting emails from gold sellers I was furious and “Blizzard Support” was downright rude to me. Insisting it was impossible when it is the only explanation.

To answer your post i think its a little from column A and little from column B..

honestly , your theory makes alot of sense . and just the fact that ur post was deleted and banned sounds like theres something even more fishy going on and they are trying to hide it . i have a theory also , they could possibly be hacking accounts themselfs in order to meaby sell more of those authenticator

i belive anything is possible this days, a scam like that would not suprise me…
But whats the point of stealing gold from players when some one inside blizzard could acess to some sort of in-game gold generator ( or even a programer himself!!) ??
Do u honestly think blizzard would risk a payment failure from a player that quited wow because of gold stealing, when in fact a player payment generates more money than gold business or even blizzard products/services… an account means current payment!! every month! every year!!

This is actually pretty similar to what my friends and I have been discussing for about a month now. People getting hacked is absolutely constant. Not a week goes by that there isn’t -someone- in my guild being hacked.

I was hacked as well and I never visit suspicious sites or acknowledge spammers (I report spam and ignore immediately upon getting a whisper from one). Not to mention I’m paranoid and keep my computer completely locked down. After I was hacked I couldn’t find a single malicious scrap of software anywhere on my system.

I really do think the hacking might be propagated by Blizzard. Maybe its just a rogue employee selling account info, maybe its a total upper management plot to make more money and make sure everyone has an authenticator (an extra 6 bucks per player would actually net a decent amount of money.)

Either way… definitely something to wonder about…

You guys are absolutely insane if you think that this is what is happening. You either fell prey to a phishing scam or were the victim of a keylogger. If you’re unable to keep your account information safe, get an authenticator.

I don’t use an authenticator and my account has never been compromised. I’ve been playing since November 2004.

I never had any problem with my account, never got hacked ,just changed the password for the first time in about one year few days ago and don’t have an authenticator.
I use a mail addres only for WoW stuff, never use it to anything else, and never received any mail from gold seelers. But honestly, I consider the fact of never being hacked, pure luck.

But this “rogue emplyee” theroy really makes sense.

I live in Brazil, and is pretty common here in some places, to see data that was meant to be confidential about government employees , like fone numbers and address in hands of insurance brokers and the like.
And I really doubt that this kind of “data leakage” happens only here, or only in governmets.
Why not in Blizzard, from the hands of the supposed rogue employee or the “black project” theory?

This isn’t “insane”, I think is a real probability.
I really hope not, but for now, it is.

Wow.
That is stuipid.

IF Blizzard wanted to sell gold – they would just make it with a blizzard superuser function.

Blizzard spends MILLIONS on technical support helping people get thier hacked stuff BACK. It would be a loosing proposition for them to waste time hacking your account in order to steal your gold when THEY COULD JUST MAKE IT!

This is not insane, and it is far from stupid.

How obvious would it be if people are buying gold and no-one is being hacked? Where is the gold coming from? Thin air perhaps? Gold from thin air = created by Blizzard = not so covert an operation.

If you haven’t read about how greedy the CEO of Blizzard really is, maybe you should,

http://www.teamliquid.net/foru....._id=128252

I have considered this same idea actually. Three different friends who let their accounts expire got hacked after leaving the accounts inactive for a while.

Two of them happened to get caught immediately because their toons were left in the guild and people saw them log on, knew it could not actually be them because they did not respond when messaged (and definitely would have), so we contacted them in real life and they were able to stop it before much damage was done.

The other was my son, and it was not caught until the following day, and it is banned permanently “for violation of the terms of agreement”, even though my son proved who he is and that he was not the one on the account while it was gold farming. Blizzard refused to restore the account to him.

The interesting thing is that in all three cases, the accounts were reopened with credit cards and had authenticators put on them immediately upon activation. None of the account owners found key loggers, viruses, or any evidence of email hacking, and in fact, the logins for the accounts were not changed, just had authenticators put on them to keep the actual owners out.

This seemed weird the first time, but by the third time the same thing had happened, I really had to wonder. These were all people I have known for a very long time, who never, and I mean NEVER, gave their info out, and one of them even had an authenticator already on his account before letting it go inactive. To the best of my knowledge, to remove an authenticator requires either to have the authenticator to log into blizzard, or a blizzard tech who can remove it from their end. The account owner was told “he must have disabled it at some point and forgotten.”

I could believe that i had a thought in my head about a rogue employee at blizzard too but if they were selling gold y hide it when players r too scared to get there accounts banned? if blizzard was selling gold wouldnt u think they’d just have an add on there site saying idk like “now pay X amount of money and we will give u gold” or watever u know ppl would know its legal ingame and safe so theyd buy it from blizzard which brings me back to the rogue not blizzard actualy being aware of this rogue employee ur there is ur post being deleted and banned very odd i understand deleting ur post by the ban…thats a little far but then also my brother has been playing since the burning crusade and he hasnt gotten hacked once. ive gotten hacked twice first time idk how in the hell it happened second i gave m info to a “trusted” friend who i think got hacked cuz she hasnt been on in months. selling accounts on the other hand u can get big bucks for. but at a legal stand point theres nothing we can do in the blizzard agreement it states “you do not own your charicters they are property of blizzard entertainment” but then the authenticator issue why would blizzard sell those if they knew that they could no longer hack/sell shit cuz the authenticator makes ur account hack proof and if ur account gets hacked fingers get pointed at blizzard im more sided with the rogue employee but what ive read from u other guys doesnt make sence its almost as if there sided with one another but then why would u get ur account back if they were all working together on this and why was my bro never hacked ONCE hes even quit for a while also…how in the hell do the hackers get ur email adress? when i got hacked i used a different email adress and almost immediately i got hacker messages and my old email still gets them also what i find odd is i have been playing for 2 years way back when u had to enter ur account name not ur email adress i never had an issue with my account untill the battle.net conversion the next day i got hacked maybe battle.net has something to do with this and not blizzard, blizzard and battle.net share information and its very possible there trying to shut blizz down id like to see what would happen if blizzard pulled away from battle.net and u used ur old info…i blame battle.net

It doesn’t make sense that Blizzard would need to hack accounts. There are already hackers out there, so Blizzard already has that cover they need in order to create gold by themselves from thin air and sell it to people under a different company name not connected to them.

It’s pretty simple, really. Hackers have key-logger programs set to infect computers when uses either go to fake gold-farming websites, or when users download hacked mods for WoW. Upon mod installation, the key-logger implants itself into WoW and watches for you to type your log-in info. It then transmits the key-strokes back to the hacker and they can log into your account. They clean out your gold and sell it.

If Blizzard does this, they will lose monthly subscriptions – and for what? To make $30 on the gold? That makes no sense because they’ll make hundreds if they keep that person playing and paying their subscription. When I got hacked, I was very tempted to quit the game. It was so much trouble to get everything restored and Blizz has a lot of incompetent employees that made it a real mess. When people are addicted to a game, if you make them wait a week or two to play the game, they will sometimes say the heck with it and start playing something else. They don’t want to upset subscription payers. Makes absolutely no business sense. Also, if it were got out that they were doing that, MANY people would feel disenfranchised and quit playing the game altogether.

The theory is interesting, but doesn’t work when put into practice. It would be bad business all around. Makes no sense.

No sense at all.

You are wrong and here is why:

They can create/make gold from code, no need to hack.

They can create/make any character and any item they want, no need to sell account info.

They can make anything they want at any point in time and sell it anytime they wish. They do not need to ever hack or sell any of their own accounts since they can create anything they want.

So, take off your hat, think logically.

Rogue employee has to be it. Makes perfect sense too. Here you are in your Dilbert office cubicle making $10 an hour…. and it’s possible to double that DAILY. Yeah it’s entirely possible and makes sense.

You’d think Blizz security would maybe be on top of it.

As to the Battle.net theory… uh… it’s the same company guys.

Several posters have commented that this makes bad business sense to have a “Black op” program and I definitely agree.

I also agree, however, that the leak must be coming from Blizzard. I think it’s far more likely that it’s just some guy making $15-20 an hour who decided to make money on the side by selling account info to overseas buyers.

It’s not just phishing, and keylogger trojans doing this. Some of us who have been hacked are capable of preventing that sort of thing from occuring.

Can’t say I’m surprised you got banned for posting it on Blizzard’s forums, but I am disappointed that their solution is for you to drop $10 on an authenticator.

Make no mistake, this is BIG business, and corporate spies are almost inevitable.

btw, keyloggers that “imbed themselves into wow” is a pretty stupid idea. you think hackers out there are making keyloggers just to get wow account info? your online banking logins, your personal information, your paypal, your ebay, your social security numbers, you e-mail, etc. are all more valuable than your damn wow account. If they could get keyloggers into your system that easily, people would have a lot more problems than just their wow account being hacked.

and blizzard most definitely does NOT spend MILLIONS getting cyber items back to customers. if you really believe that, then you have not concept of how overhead works, you fucking moron.

Just stop playing wow a month ago and account has been inactive for that preiod, with no payment going to them. And low and behold i start getting rogue emails saying that my account has been compromised. I have never in 3 years of playing recieved such emails.

I know 2 friends who also stoped playing for 3 to 5 months, when they went back all of their accounts had been so called hacked and blizzard blamed them for security laps. When again their email addys were soley for wow.

Blizzard could put an end to gold sellers in one swoop. I have run gaming servers in the past and we always ran scripts and software in line with multiplayer online games to kick and ban people for hacks, swearing,bots even on setting limits on stuff transferd from char to char. Believe me it so simple its stupid.

So if you believe that blizard with its $81,000,000 to $90,000,000 income cant do this you are a fool.