Question about hacked account.

#0 - Oct. 25, 2010, 2:36 p.m.

My girlfriend logged onto her account this morning (Vampy on Smolderthorn) and she was completely naked and had 0 gold and no items in her inventory. It appears she was hacked at about 0300 EST last night. I immediately made her change her password (oddly, the hacker didn't change her password). However, one of her bank alts was deleted, and a new character had been created. She's missing about 20000 gold across several characters and she also emptied out thousands of frostweave/enchanting mats and sulfuron/elementium ignots from my alt guild bank (one of her characters had access to my guild bank). I also immediately made her purchase an authenticator, and in the mean time she is using my blackberry for an authenticator.

She has scanned her computer and found 3 viruses and I assume that's the problem, obviously.

My questions are about restoration of characters and items.
I have read several things saying that blizzard doesn't always restore every item or character and I'm rather worried about that, for her sake and mine. She had items on her account that aren't obtainable anymore (Haunted Memento and stuff like that). Also, who needs to submit a ticket for my guild bank? Me or her? And when she submits her ticket does she need to name every character that was hacked on every realm? (She has a ton of bank alts that had stuff removed, it's hard to tell what stuff exactly was removed because of the amount of stuff she had, especially characters that aren't on her main realm). Oddly the hacker didn't remove all the mats from her mailbox and stuff, but my question is really how detailed does her ticket have to be to make sure that she gets the max amount restored.
For now, she has changed her password, cleaned her computer of the virus, added an authenticator and submitted a general ticket that she was hacked and requesting character restoration.
I also told her to log out and not log back in until she recieves some sort of response from blizzard.
Is there anything else that needs done to ensure she gets EVERYTHING back that she and I lost?

Thanks for any help that can be given.

Orlyia

#1 - Oct. 25, 2010, 2:46 p.m.

That covers most of the bases, and that authenticator will go a long way towards preventing a recurrence.

Might also want to verify her email is secure, we've seen a lot of that sort of thing increasingly of late.

Once this is restored if anything was missed, just let us know immediately. The vast majority of the time these are done on the first pass, but it's always possible for something to get overlooked.

If she didn't mention the guildbank involvement, I'd edit the petition already in to include that. If any of her professions were altered, that's also good to mention.

Otherwise, this is sadly something we deal with day in and day out. The thieves that do this depend on victimizing anyone they can to fuel their business. I hope if you ever hear anyone talking about buying gold or services from such cretins and saying it doesn't 'hurt anyone', you let them know this is NOT a victimless crime. Without buyers, there would be no market for sellers.

Orlyia

#3 - Oct. 25, 2010, 2:55 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Thank you very much for your quick response. Just worried that something won't get restored and she or I won't notice until outside of the 2 week window for character restoration. They hit her pretty hard because her main is an enchanter, so she is missing absoltely everything.

She's going to change every password she has used on her laptop to make sure a keylogger didn't catch anything else.

About how long can she expect before her account is playable again so that she can go through it and see what's missing?

Thanks again for your response.

At the moment, restorations are still fairly short. I'd keep an eye on the mail today, I'd say likely no later than tomorrow. That's subject to the volume incoming of course, but those don't seem to be taking terribly long at the moment.