I received a message from a scammer… Would you be able to track the name and ban their IP address… Also I was recording live stream on facebook.
This was their message to me
[Blizzardl] whispers: [Blizzard Administrator] GM: We depth investigation abnormal account. Please visit: www . battle-warcraft . com Confirm that you are the original owner of the account, otherwise we will suspend your account…
Considering most IP addresses are dynamic, banning one specific IP address would not be very effective.
These scammers have always existed however, The correct thing to do was right click on their name, and choose “Report Player”, and let Blizzard handle it internally.
They’ve had this nonsensical sentence in their posts since the start of the game. You would have thought someone would’ve corrected it by now.
Hopefully you didn’t visit the site. If you did, you need to change your password immediately as you’ll have put your account information on a fake site.
Blizzard should have something to track the name of any character using any text saying blizzard… Should prevent anyone from creating a toon with that name…
Unfortunately they use a mixture of á í etc to mask it. You cant actually create a character called “blizzard”… they circumvent it. However, Blizzard NEVER use that name, they all have RP names and carry the Blizzard logo in chat so you know its genuine.
Blizzard can choose a variety of names that look like or contain the word blizzard… Even ban the word Blizzard that even uses special characters… Its not Difficult… There are only 2 vowels in the word Blizzard…
Ban all names that contain anything that looks like Blizzard… Genuine players will be able to know the difference if special letters are used…
All names containing the word that looks like Blizzard should be reported and Blocked…
Anyone falling for such a blatant scam shouldn’t be on the internet, never mind the fact official PMs from Blizzard GMs have a Blizzard Icon, and a separate PM window, for them.
New players are unlikely to know… Blizzard should prevent all character names that look like the word Blizzard… Its not difficult… And how can you not have sympathy for people that fall for it…
All names that look like the word Blizzard even using special letters should be blocked…
But even if that was done, they’d find some way to get round it. They’ve been around almost since the game was launched. There are warnings on the start screen.
And, in case anyone’s still in any doubt, GMs NEVER have the word Blizzard as part of their name. They also speak/write grammatical English which makes sense.
Honestly what you say… its almost like you dont want Blizzard to try and stop them…
Why is it that just for the sake of it, people always have an opposing opinion…
Also you should be Reporting these accounts to us, quite often the accounts are other player accounts they have hacked and are now using for Spamming other players.
It’s impossible to stop very determined people from finding ways to do what they want in many cases, they can “mask” the whisper by using Spaces, or tabs, they can do it through a macro. There’s a lot of ways we see it done, and it’s impossible to ban the word “blizzard” from ingame chat between players.
In regards to the phishing we have some advice for players about GM whispers here. As you say though new players may not be aware of how GMs work, but we would like to think that people would ask other players before going to a random website.
My only other advice is to make sure everyone uses some form of 2 Factor Authentication, it will help protect your “investment” in the game and with us, there’s a reason many banks use these security measures because they are effective at reducing customers being the victims of cyber-crime.
Reducing the amount of hacked accounts, by using an Authenticator, also frees up GMs for other tasks and tickets, as Restoring accounts fully takes time in many cases. It’s not mandatory, but we do try to strongly encourage people to use our Security options, the App is also free.
Being new has absolutely nothing to do with common sense. Do you think a GM would have such pathetic spelling, grammar, or would use spaced out dodgy looking links?
It falls down to common sense of being on the internet, such as not opening random .exe files or links in your emails…