Account Suspended w/o information

#1 - Nov. 13, 2013, 1:26 p.m.

My best friends arena net account was suspended w/o reason last week. After doing some research it seemed that he had made a purchase of 10 dollars w/ a card he had saved. After some fishy emails from Noreply@guildwars2 which seems to be a phishing email scam. Both he and his step mother who’s card was used for the purchase feared the account was compromised and the purchase was not correctly done.

After various calls she for safety shut down her card as other charges showed up and they were not sure if it was related to the account.

His account was then suspended and after various support tickets the support team did not explain or even give a little information to him to help resolve the issue.

Instead they possibly emailed his step mother, who knows nothing about gaming. She also was aware of the phishing scam as her step-son (my friend) had warned her about it.

One email she believes she received mentioned something about permanently deleting the account which she deleted everything regarding Guild Wars 2 on her email thinking they would instead email my friend about the account.

Due to lack of communication from your staff they now have a card they shut off and changed and an account they believe is now permanently suspended/deleted without proper chance to resolve the issue.

If a reasoning behind the suspension had been given they could have communicated and gotten the issue resolved promtly.

He has not received any response from your support team in over a week, even after providing much information that he himself had to look up and search for.

I feel this is unjust and unprofessional way of handling a situation like this and these phishing emails from noreply@guildwars2 are getting out of hand and causing way too many problems with people who are not familiar with the game or online in general.

I hope someone here sees this and decides to finally help him or at least see how badly the team has handled this situation and hopefully avoid this issue in the future.

Someone has to do something about informing people about these phishing emails

Gaile Gray

#4 - Nov. 13, 2013, 4:12 p.m.

Brother Grimm.5176:
Having CC charges reversed (I’m guessing a BLOCKED CC would result in the same) is a HUGE deal breaker for on-line retailers.

You also need to understand that ANet will NOT discuss the case with anyone but the account owner.

Once a charge-back in enacted on a credit card, we are required to close the account. There are many ways to prevent this, and this family pre-emptively doing a charge-back was a very poor manner of dealing with this issue. Any on-line business that I knows about would react in the same way, because the actions taken resemble exactly those taken by those intending to defraud our company.

The account owner needs to contact support directly. It is with him, and only him, that we will discuss the details of this case. This is possible by clicking Support at the top of this page and then “Submit a request.” If a ticket has been filed, then the account owner must continue the discussion with support. If the matter has been closed in error — and I don’t imagine that is the care here, my instincts suggest this still is an open case — then the account owner may post here, or you may do so on his behalf. But posting here, in these circumstances, seems premature. A judgment of a “lack of professionalism” and statements that seem to blame us for phishing attempts are likewise misplaced.

If you believe we should be making people aware of phishing atempts, be assured we are:
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/support/account/e-Mail-from-ArenaNet-Please-read-merged/first#post1807876
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/support/account/A-Note-about-Phishing-Emails-1/first#post2556003 (offered in all four supported languages)

And we’ve posted announcements on our support pages, as well.

Gaile Gray

#6 - Nov. 13, 2013, 4:24 p.m.

jon.2913:
Thats the thing they didn’t give the account owner of either the actual account or the card holder any info.

They didn’t want exact details but reasoning on what the suspension was on… such as saying it was on a purchase or something.

the charges were not reversed. it was that his step mom began to recieve emails from that phishing email and out of panic she deleted the emails and put a hold on the card. It was a miscommunication but they immediately suspended his account and he can’t even contact customer support.

It’s one thing to suspend the account.

It’s another to completely remove any possibility for them to fix the situation and throw an account away.

I have them both at my home now and we’ll be emailing customer care to solve the issue and post the ticket here

That is the cost of doing a charge-back. That is the absolute LAST thing a customer should do, not the first. And blaming the company for protecting itself from fraud —
which is a huge issue with any on-line business -- is unfair and narrow-sighted. We did not cause the problem for which we are being blamed, and I can’t help but feel that I need to make that clear.

If your friend has submitted a ticket and has not gotten a response, have him check Junk, Spam, and Deleted Mails and also check my thread about Missing Mails for information about how ISP — not us, but e-mail providers — are causing problems with the receipt of our e-mails. Again, just like someone voluntarily doing charge-backs or abusing our address to send phishing e-mails, this is not something over which we have control, but we will try to help.

If the new ticket needs assistance after three days, please post in the Tickets for Review thread above.