Long story short: I’m playing since 2007, I got hacked and all my gold was stolen.
Blizzard refused to give it back, and they didn’t EVEN CARE about punish those who made it.
Customer service even blamed me for not having Blizzard authenticator, the same crap app that do not work for a good amount of us. Never ever had a app that did not work, so gj Blizzard.
If you can’t use their trash authenticator, you are doomed, because password and email change happens without any confirmation on your email or phone.
I can’t believe how Customer Service became so unhuman! 90% of their answers are from bots, so I guess that’s why they love bots, scammers and hackers so much.
Facts:
Nobody cares if you are playing or not (they trust so much on WOW addiction, they don’t even care of customers anymore);
Everybody gonna be hacked, even you, not a matter of if but when.
Never once been hacked using the authenticator. But it’s clear you are not telling us the whole story and if you don’t have an authenticator you’ve no one to blame but yourself and whining about a perceived lack of “customer service” isn’t going to help you.
I got hacked exactly once and that was during WotLK, when you could still be hacked even with authenticator and I don’t know how it is today, but I got an email “your password was changed successfully”, that’s how I did realize. I didn’t even play at the time and for sure didn’t enter my credentials somewhere. Again…it was a different time and since then, my account never got hacked again.
Nowadays you only get hacked with easy passwords and known email addresses or if another website had a leak and against all common sense you did use the same password on more than one website (which is completely idiotic btw.).
Or of course if you did get catched by a phishing attack.
And the most important thing: to be able to get hacked you most not use the authenticator.
The authenticator is not even it’s own app anymore nowadays, it is integrated in the (good working) battle.net app.
I don’t judge on what you tell here about your exchange with CS, since I don’t know what was said from who and in what manner and people here on the forums tend to “forget” to add important information on occasion when complaining about others.
About the automated answers from CS and the typical “textblock” answers from CS: As sad as it is, that is nowadays kind of an industry standard for CS, no matter where you look. The correct reaction to it is to write another (friendly!) message to the same ticket.
I imagine they advised you could increase your account security with an authenticator rather than any blame.
Usually with compromised accounts they will do a roll back to a point in time you last had control of your account and restore any lost items.
Surely if someone’s wow addiction is so high they would be devastated to lose everything and be demotivated?
There is no way to 100% protect yourself against being hacked but there are things you can do to make your account as secure as possible. This article includes a lot of advice at the bottom to protect yourself as best as possible, people can look through the drop down options.
We can’t discuss specifics of tickets but if there is nothing being done about restoring your account I would reopen the ticket saying your issue isn’t resolved, if that is not possible start a new ticket referencing the old one.
On the one hand: Perhaps this will teach you the value of password managers (so you can have complex passwords) and authenticators.
On the other hand: Blizzard’s customer service could use some work… just blaming the customer using an auto-responding bot is pretty lame, not gonna lie…
Proof of this please, you are the FIRST person I’ve ever seen claiming the authenticator “has never worked”
As for the absolute state of customer service, who the hell would want to deal with all the karens these days? Especially when they are so prone to exaggeration and abuse
The Customer support is pointless at this point.
Unless there’s unrefutable evidence provided that something they did is wrong, they won’t do much more outsite denying any claims or overturning decisions.
You have two ways around this. And one way through.
Put the master password on a paper and hide it WELL. In your house.
Create a certificate that also unlocks the password manager and hide it well. You may choose to encrypt this key and drop it off at cloud storage or something, or a thumb drive.
Don’t forget the password you use literally 4-5 times a day? I mean… that’s actually kindda hard to do in the first place, but okay.
A thumb drive that unlocks your password manager is a pretty good one if you’re forgetful. Have a look at YubiKey.
Also don’t forget, you can always use your email address to unlock everything. E-Mail addresses can often be unlocked by your phone itself (if it is i.e. a google account and you have an android) or by SMS (so again with your phone). So you usually have a way to get things back.
And yes…Yubikey is a good advise, also for 2FA or as Passkey.
This will sound dark, but I don’t want my most trusted family members to lose access to my accounts should something happen to me. And yes, this includes access to my WoW account where they can transfer my gold to them, all 310g and 20s of it.
I don’t think that’s dark at all, but understandable. The YubiKey can help achieve this if that’s something that bothers you. This way you get security by having to use for example your finger print to unlock your password manager. If the person is dead, and you’re reasonably quick, you can do this. If sleeping, there’s a good chance you’ll notice.
You can iirc also add multiple users to it.
It’s a morbid thought but an interesting one nevertheless, so have a like for it. As it happens though it’s against the WoW ToS, incredulously. It’s a very common point of discussion in IT security and ownership of digital goods debates.
You should authenticate everything that’s deemed important online these days. It’s far, far too easy for third parties to get hold of your information.
Let’s be honest, 99.999% of the time an account gets hacked it’s because the company got hacked and leaked all your info to 3rd parties. Or just sold it even.
It’s a massive rabbit hole to go down for sure. It’s also scary how certain people in power don’t quite seem to have their marbles, which could very much affect anyone and everyone using certain platforms.
It’s hard though. I mean… credit rating agencies get hacked, companies build profiles based on your browsing habits. FaceBook was able to automatically work out my existence and appearance and I had to go in there and tell them to delete it explicitly without ever having made an account in the first place. And this was before AI! They just had algorithms going through texts - like my sister would take a photo, upload it, and write “My brother and I on the beach in northern Jutland!” and that was enough!
If you’re not careful your info might show up in the yellow pages, your IP address gets leaked, you’re using an Android phone and Google does its thing, drive-by attacks from ads on websites, and I think recently there was a hack which contained social security numbers from 1.5 BILLION people. And not long before that, some idiot took the entire person database of Denmark, the CPR registry (Civil Person Registry), put it on a USB stick, and “accidentally” pushed it into the mail of the Chinese embassy. Fortunately they were kind enough to give it back ASAP without looking at it, which significantly improved foreign relations. So all is well that ends well I guess…
You don’t even have to give consent sometimes. This stuff is just all over the place, it’s crazy!
The only way to protect yourself at this point is to use Linux, lock down everything, and use proxy mails all over the place. macOS can also be OK if you set it up right. Windows is a disaster zone in regards to privacy, and so is Android. And pray. A lot.
