New scam - phishing for WoW account

Zax63

Illuminator
Zax63
Joined
Oct 26, 2005
Messages
3,096
Location
Philadelphia, PA, USA
New to me:

Greetings!
It has come to our attention that you are trying to sell/trade your personal World of Warcraft account(s).
As you may or may not be aware of, this conflicts with the EULA and Terms of Agreement.
If this proves to be true, your account can and will be disabled. It will be ongoing for further investigation by Blizzard Entertainment's employees.
If you wish to not get your account suspended you should immediately verify your account ownership. If the information is deemed accurate, the investigation will be dropped.
This action is taken because we at Blizzard Entertainment take these sales
quite seriously. We need to confirm you are the original owner of the account.
This is easiest done by confirming your personal information along with concealed information about your account.
You can confirm that you are the original owner of the account by replying to this email with:

Use the following template below to verify your account and information via email.
* First and Surname
* Date of birth
* Address
* Zip code
* Phone number
* Country
* Account e-mail
* Account name
* Account password
* Secret Question and Answer
-Or-
WoW CD-Key
Show * Please enter the correct information
If you ignore this mail your account can and will be closed permanently. Once we verify your account, we will reply to your e-mail informing you that we have dropped the investigation.
We ask you to NOT change password until the investigation is fully completed.
Blizzard Entertainment Inc
Account Administration Teamaa
P.O. Box 18979, Irvine, CA 92623
Regards,
Account Administration Team
Blizzard Entertainment
2009-08-28
wowaccountadmin
Click to expand...

Don't know why but it strikes me as funny that someone is phishing for WoW accounts.
 
Do people actually fall for emails like this? Blizzard states quite clearly that no employee will ever ask for your account name or password.
 
We get those kind of adverts while playing the game as well! Ranging from a charactor yelling or whispering (err, text chat yelling or text chat whispering) "Get gold go to www.(such and such address).com".

Sometimes they advertise by whispering "Hey!! How are you?"
So you answer "Hi. Do I know you?" and they tell you about some kind of instance that you most likely could have run some time ago, then go into this story about the "new mounts" (or gear, or whatever) Blizzard is coming out with. Then tell you the website to go to, all acting like they know you from a previous instance or raid run.

Pretty sneaky people sometimes......

To go further, in order to help fight these people, Blizzard offers (for $6.00) a little keychain that comes up with a number when you press a button on it. So when you sign in, you have to type in the number from your keychain. My main is a guild leader, so I have one of those.
 
Last edited:
I do not play computer games over the Internet. I wonder if I will ever get one of these? If so what can I do? I cannot lose what I do not have.
 
These sorts of phishing scams for WoW accounts aren't new in the slightest. It's been going on for well over a year now (well, okay, several years).

Yes, people fall for those scams. Constantly. In fact, the WoW account stealing ones got their inspiration from the ones that phishers would send out to scam their way into bank accounts, paypal accounts, etc., etc..

I think it's pretty sad that these sorts of things actually work... Just another example of how the general public doesn't use any sort of critical thinking skill at all most of the time. If they did... Well, these things would jump right out as being scams.

Does Blizzard really need you to provide any of that information? It's all stored in their system. Why would Blizzard ask you to not change your password? Why would they even ask for it in the first place? They don't need your password to access your account information. And why would they typo their own department name? And would their grammar in such an official notice be as crappy as it is? Why would they be asking for your email address, when they just used said address to contact you?

See, if anyone getting one of those emails bothered to ask even one of the questions above, they'd realize the email was a scam. Not to mention, looking at the actual headers of the email to see that the email isn't actually from blizzard.com, but is instead from someone with handle similar to blizzard at hotmail or yahoo or gmail... Cuz yeah, blizzard uses gmail for all their official correspondence... :rolleyes:

/rant off
 
rjh01 said:
I do not play computer games over the Internet. I wonder if I will ever get one of these? If so what can I do? I cannot lose what I do not have.
Click to expand...
Actually... If you ever get a phishing email for WoW, please forward it to hacks@blizzard.com with full headers so that Blizzard can take action to shut down the email address being used, and maybe even get lucky on nailing the people sending out those damned things!
 
So while we are here, what server do you nerds play on?

I have a 80 pally(Kelos) and an 80 rogue(Razh) on Anvilmar.

I currently am lvling a 22 warlock(Necroma) after the *no more twinks* patch exclusively in BGs, going to try to go 10 to 80 with minimal PVE. Ahhhhhh I am such a loser... lol
 
4 80s, 3 70s.. I don't have the schedule to raid so when I play I just level, pvp, or run instances. All my characters are horde and I play on Emerald Dream and Hyjal.
 
Bloodtoes said:
4 80s, 3 70s.. I don't have the schedule to raid so when I play I just level, pvp, or run instances. All my characters are horde and I play on Emerald Dream and Hyjal.
Click to expand...

Come join us in Madoran. That's where us JREF'ers are playing. Our guild is called Empirical. :)
 
Most convincing WoW scam I got was a mail saying they needed me to log in with a link to a page that looked exactly like the WoW login. Fortunately my WoW account was a few years out of date (meaning I wouldn't care much if someone got it), and I just changed my password and all was well.
 
This is interesting to me not because it’s anything new to WoW, but that it ever became so common there. I mean, you know the game is big business when….

And the reason why they do it is because there’s actually good money in it.

It goes something like this:
  1. Scammer phishes your account information.
  2. Scammer strips your “toon” of all his gear and vendorsells it for gold.
  3. Scammer sends the gold to one of his toons.
    (Optional) Scammer uses your toon’s tradeskills (sometimes along with bugs in the game) to earn more gold for his toon.
  4. Scammer uses a “free trial” user account and a level-1 toon to advertise his business.
  5. Scammer sells the ill-begotten gold to other players for real money.
    (Optional) Scammer also phishes these players’ account information.
 
I got hacked a long time ago from a trojan. When I got my account back every one of my characters had everything sold and all gold transferred. I got it all back weeks later but it was an ordeal. Thankfully I haven't touched the game in about a year and a half.
 
The latter. I used to be a raider. It was very time consuming and getting boring.
 
Sadly, yes... people do fall for these scams. Go check out the Customer Service forums on the WoW site to see some examples.

My highest characters are an 80 druid, 77 warlock & 70 priest on Tortheldrin.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom