I was very surprised to receive yet another identical spam message whisper today from account “Blízzard”, that threatened me to delete my account if I decline to enter my full account information into a fake website. The identical message I receive for weeks from the identical account. Every day.
Surprised, that first scammers are still allowed to use such names, and second that after I reported that and blocked that account, someone at Blizzard actually removed all such blacklists so these scammers can resend whispers. That surprised the heck out of me.
So, what is your excuse for that? Does Blizzard really only act, when federal officers walk thru the door with a subpoena? Otherwise all reports for scam, harassment land in the trash with a bot fake-replying “we take every report very seriously”?
Well, as I have proof that I blocked the scammers and you at Blizzard lifted all these blocks on purpose, maybe it’s time to let officials start investigating in what illegal activities some of your employees are involved. Or if that whole scam operation is actually run by Blizzard itself. One would think with everything that is going on now at Blizzard, at least someone get off the lazy chair.
Yes, I know you at Blizzard are very, very, very, very sorry and encourage me to continue to report everything. And you take every report very, very, very, very seriously. And I can just block people — so, obviously you haven’t understood I single word that I have written. I block, you remove the block. Like clockwork.
Firstly, the scammer gets around the name filter by using a variety of ascii tricks to change the name from a simple Blizzard to Blízzard or Blizzárd etc etc
The whisper a range of people
They then delete the character
When they delete the character, the name is removed from your ignore list as the character no longer exists.
Then they recreate
Then they whisper a range of people
etc etc ad nauseum.
and accounts are Blízzard-Turalyon as well as Blízzard-Doomhammer.
If Blizzard is unable to normalize names (that’s what it’s called to convert letters to their base form), then they need to hire people that can. But even that is irrelevant as the given account is harassing me and others for weeks. Not a variation, it’s the textual-identical account name. The second account on Doomhammer will whisper me tomorrow. I already know the timeline.
You’re telling me that a billion dollar company is too stupid to (1) normalize names and (2) block names for reuse to prohibit create/delete cycles? especially when that name was used for illegal activities? And (3) that they are unable to auto-block or at least auto-silence new characters that spam the identical message to thousands of other players they never interacted with before?
I expect Blizzard to take immediate action, this has gone on for weeks. Maybe months. I block, it has to stay block. I don’t care about “technical difficulties”. Yes, you’re a “Green” not a “Blue”. Then mark this as “need help/reply from official rep”.
Well you could end that frustration by downloading the addon Badboy, I know you should not have to rely on addons, I understand that, but it will block their whispers completely. I’ve not received one of these whispers since I stared using it years ago. Hopefully that may ease your understandable frustration.
Actually, no. It doesn’t help. I can make my own addon and block all whispers, and auto-report that. But rest assured, that will only get me banned. Not the scammers. There is a reason for all the lawsuits the company is facing. But this is not the topic here.
There is no doubt in my mind, that the same that applies to scam reports also applies to harassment reports. Someone reports harassment and then someone at Blizzard removes all blocks while dancing because “harassment is fun, don’t ruin the party”. Reading that should make people at Blizzard turn pale and say “that’s what our players think of us? how did we present yourself that way?”. Yes, that’s what we think of Blizzard, that’s what state officials think of Blizzard.
All reports are ignored. No action is ever taken. Instead we shall block and install addons while Blizzard removes blocks and bans these addons.
I want these scammer accounts deleted. Today. Now. I don’t want to see these account names ever again. If I receive another scam message from similar account names, then I will report again, and I expect a reply “we removed those too”. I want feedback that action is taken. The player vs scammer ratio is like 10000:1 – There aren’t so many variations of Blizzard possible to have me ever report a second time.
We are far away from the situation that scammers vary scam messages, or account names. Far from it. We all pay a lot of money every month, it is not too much to ask that Blizzard adds the most basic spam protection, spam protection 101. And that our reports are taken seriously. Twitch had spam issues years ago, now there is absolutely nothing anymore. If I report on Twitch, I get a confirmation reply “we received your report”. Often I also receive a reply “We took action and thank you for bringing this to our attention”. What is WRONG with “your” company?
Characters have a unique ID number, and deleting a character and remaking it gives you another unique ID number, and it’s these ID numbers that are used for ignoring. Normalisation will restrict usable names considerably.
And to be honest, you are in no position to demand anything, let alone be nasty about the company.
I never get these messages, why? I use badboy. Besides only newbies or, well actually only newbies fall for this. No spam on twitch? That actually made me literally lol.
I would say what I really think about you and your entitlement in the post but this would get me a forum ban.
Compromised accounts (which is ultimately the goal of scammers like this) actually creates a significant amount of work for our support teams who then have to help restore the accounts to their owners and undo the damage. Not to mention it’s often those compromised accounts that gets used in further scams and other violations.
We even offer extra rewards for players that secure their account with both an authenticator and phone number as one way to help prevent this.
Sabotaging our own efforts to keep accounts secure by intentionally letting bad actors run wild doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
That said, it definitely remains an area where we have room to make improvements.
While it may seem like an easy problem to solve, it’s not quite so straightforward and there is a certain balance between limiting what scammers are able to get away with and making sure legitimate players aren’t inadvertently affected.
I can understand reports may seem pointless when the problem continues, but it actually does help a lot to close down offending accounts as quickly as possible, even if it’s not a permanent solution.
Again though it’s something we’ll keep working to address on many different fronts and can hopefully make some improvements as well in the future.
For now the best thing you and other players can do to help is to keep your own accounts secure and encourage your friends and fellow players to do the same, and continue to report offenders when you can.
I hope that helps shed some light on the situation anyway, and thanks for your assistance and understanding!
Any character created with the name “Blizzard” and its variations (apostrophe) should be prohibited. It’s a simple letter normalization with a blacklist. You already have that blacklist (NamesReserved.dbc) but it doesn’t use letter normalization.
You know what: I do that for you. I implement this normalization in LUA for your GLUE system (character generation). I don’t get pestered by these messages every day, I also have the feeling you try to get rid of the problem, your support has less to do with account recovery and everyone is happy.
Then your opinion is wrong. Blunt I know but right.
There are so many with differing letters that the can’t ban all of them and Normalisation is not as easy as you think and is not appropriate in this context.
and what about those who have the name and play normally?
All this can be solved in one easy step. Just install the badboy addon, but no you just want to see these and post indignantly on the forums.
So a blizz customer can create a character named Blízzard?
How difficult would it be to sit down one morning during coffee att blizz and just type these versions of Blizzard into the “not available nameing” folder.
Or perhaps put 50 npc´s below stormwind inaccessible with the names:
Blízzard
Blìzzard
Blïzzard
Blîzzard
Blízzard
Blìzzárd
Blïzzàrd
Blîzzärd
Blízzârd
if you have to have them claimed for important canonlore and acually have them as npc´s somewhere
Then they have to choose a different name. This is a normal already applied process for illegal names. For your convenience: https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/135764 under Penalties
The process of letter normalization is to check against a blacklist. It does not affect the chosen name. No active name with diacritic is affected in anyway unless they use a reserved name, like Blizzard.
I wasn’t the one that locked this thread (and I do not believe it’s necessary), but I can provide additional clarification since you and other posters in this thread obviously take this very seriously and believe it is not being handled correctly.
The main concern with being able to use a name variation that looks like Blizzard is absolutely legit, but as some posters have pointed out, the amount of names that can be generated to “look” like it spells out Blizzard is severely underestimated in the examples posted. Even in a theoretical situation, where machine learning and “AI” is at a level where it would be possible to block all variations efficiently, this won’t stop the people doing this - they’ll swap to versions of “Administrator”, or “Support”, or “Game Master”, or any other variation of a title or term that can be interpreted as having some form of authority.
Why authority? Because that is the actual root problem here, not the name being used - people receiving this whisper don’t look closely at the name of the sender, they look at the content of the message. Maybe English isn’t their first language, or they’re young and don’t have a lot of worldly experience. Maybe they’re just tired from a long day and don’t realise what’s actually going on. This is what the people behind these types of scams prey on - that “Oh no!” feeling of receiving a scary message that stops normal, rational people from thinking clearly for just a moment, and instead makes them act against their better nature. And after they’ve put in their login details their account gets stolen too, and the people that did this will abuse their account in turn and send even more whispers out to even more unsuspecting victims, some of whom will also fall for this for the same reasons, and the problem continues.
This is why we ask you to use the Report Player feature to report these whispers. Our Phishing Scams article also has some worthwhile information on it that I absolutely recommend you check, but even just a cursory google search about the term “phishing” and how wide-spread this abuse is will be far more information than we can even encompass in a forum post or support article.
Here at Blizzard, we choose to focus on account security and education. Account compromises become significantly harder when you and your friends add an Authenticator to your account, and Phone Notifications as well. Stopping account compromises this way in turn stops more phishing scam whispers being sent out, which is how this problem can be best combatted.
Thank you again for reporting your concerns, and we hope you can help us by doing what we recommended everyone does :).
