#0 - Sept. 17, 2010, 8:53 p.m.
I took an extended break from wow about a year ago (last October), and hadn't been paying for my account since then. I was hacked 3 months ago, via what i can only imagine to be a brute-force attack. I added an authenticator onto my account at that point, and tries to see if my wow account was paid for (ie: were my toons still intact, and had they been cleaned out).
I saw that my account was banned (72 hr), but appeared to not be paid for. I wasn't interested in paying to see if my toon was naked, and assumed that since blizzard had caught the issue, that everything was well in hand. I followed the instructions at the exploitfaq page under blizzard's help, and sent a nice mail that was never responded to via the form there. After a somewhat less happy note to customer service directly, a GM reset my password, which made me feel like he hadn't read my mail which clearly stated that I had reset my password, and added an authenticator, and just wanted advised as to what to do.
Between then and now i had an iPhone failure and didn't replace the authenticator in a timely manner. This was somewhat dumb of me. :/
Fast forward to Sept 5th, I got another email from blizzard, notifying me that my account has been locked due to suspicious activity. I logged into my battle net account to find that this time my account HAD been activated, and after changing password and re-adding an authenticator, logged in to find my toons gutted, my personal bank empty, and ~40k gold gone.
I decided that I shouldn't look a gift-horse in the mouth in the form of a paid month of WoW & that I would begin playing for awhile again, since i had intended to return with Cataclysm anyway. I submitted a petition about the return of my belongings, and hopped to a new toon on a server i had some friends with, expecting a whisper from a GM in a couple hours, hopefully with some good news.
Instead, I received 4 form mails. 3 were similar, restoration notifications mentioning the names of my 3 level 80 toons, and listing a short list of items that had been restored. The lists were no-where near what had been stolen, and no gold was mentioned in any of them. The fourth email read "Unfortunately, we were unable to provide the restoration you requested because we could not verify the loss of the item(s) you reported.". I also received a single in-game mail that implied I would be restored properly. ( http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10832731/WoW/ScreenShot_091610_185921.jpeg ) I was very disappointed in the lack of communication, and the contradictions in the communication I did receive, and was left with many questions: How were the losses of some toons verifiable and others not? Why were only some items restored and not others? Why was no gold restored? What part was not verifiable? Would screenshots of my bank logs help?
(said bank logs: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10832731/WoW/ScreenShot_091610_185738.jpeg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10832731/WoW/ScreenShot_091610_185756.jpeg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10832731/WoW/ScreenShot_091610_185759.jpeg )
I let my confusion bake a few days, and submitted another ticket September 15th. This time i stayed on the character that I submitted the ticket from, hoping to actually talk to a GM and get some of my questions answered. I waited for most of the evening for a GM to contact me. Instead, my "you have an escalated ticket open" icon suddenly became a "Please fill out a GM Survey" icon, without anyone ever talking to me.
I was somewhat upset that not only was my ticket closed, but they were asking me what kind of communication skills the GM who never spoke to me had. Needless to say I didn't leave a glowing survey response. When I tabbed out to look at my mail again, I had a message that said, apart from the usual form-letter stuff, "Unfortunately, we were unable to provide the restoration you requested because we could not verify the loss of the item(s) you reported due to the amount of time that has passed since the account was initially compromised." and not to reply to this email, as conversations would be better handled online, as if any conversation had taken place.
Immediately following that, I got an in-game mail that read "Your petition has been escalated for further investigation and troubleshooting. Please keep in mind that due to the nature and complexity of these types of petitions, it may take several days for us to contact you with the results of your investigation. The ticket itself will appear as closed, however the information has been sent on!" ( http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10832731/WoW/ScreenShot_091610_185909.jpeg )
tl;dr
My account was compromised, my characters gutted, and each time I've interacted with the GM's I've gotten conflicting messages. "Yes you can have restorations / no your restoration request has been denied" the first time, and "your petition was too late to help you / we've escalated your ticket and someone'll get back to you" the second time. And nowhere in this process has anyone actually directly interacted with me. I understand that it has been three months and some records may be missing, but I don't think it's unfair to expect a constant and clear message from single people who attempt to communicate with me, and I think that these messages that keep giving me some small bit of hope are somewhat cruel. Also, I don't understand how the user-facing guild-bank logs can be more comprehensive than the administration-facing logs.
I'm hoping by sharing my story with you all, that I can get some reasonable answers to what's actually happening in this process, and whether there's any hope of resolution. Thanks to any Blizzard employee who takes the time to read and hopefully help me out!!! I do appreciate the time taken to look into this increasingly complex issue.
