edit: Happy ending! He made a call, got transferred to a manager, who investigated it, got unbanned and received an apology.
TL;DR: Guildie receives a phishing whisper in Classic WoW, goes to a site, gets hacked, loses gear and lots of stuff. Blizzard restores his account and some of the armor, but not all and none of the herbs from the mail, etc. Guildie uses Blizzard’s site to restore FR armor and blues that weren’t restored. A day or so later he gets banned because of “sanctions against Crimea”, even though he hasn’t been to Crimea for over a decade. He proves he is from a different part of Ukraine by showing a scan of his passport and gets unbanned. He gets banned again within a day, this time permanently for “abusing item restore system” that he had to use after getting hacked and because Blizzard didn’t restore all the gear.
Hello,
I am writing this post regarding the situation my guildie is in, because his English is not that good, in a hope that someone competent from Blizzard will get involved and help him promptly and therefore our guild (he recently became the second raid’s MT and RL). The whole thing is really bizarre. Russian support has not been helpful so far.
Last week he got one of those scam messages in game that ask you to go to a link (he showed a screenshot of the whisper). He went to that site for some reason, but says that he did not enter any passwords. A few seconds later, he got disconnected. When he tried to login, it said that the email doesn’t have a WoW license, probably meaning that the attacker or script changed the email on his account somehow.
He then contacted Blizzard. It took probably a day before he got his account back. Meanwhile, he removed and updated addons, scanned the computer for viruses with Dr Web. Once he got his account back, he saw that he lost thousands of items (herbs, potions, etc.) that were in his mailboxes on other characters, and his main character was naked. The raiding gear was restored by Blizzard, but not all. He used Blizzard’s website to restore the FR set and some BoP blues that weren’t restored by them. When he asked about all the items that weren’t restored, Blizzard’s rep explained that it was his fault and they would not help him restore items stolen from the mail. But the many, probably dozens of thousands worth of herbs and other reagents is the least of his current problems.
He got banned again after a day due to — I kid you not — “sanctions imposed against Crimea”. He is living in Ukraine, Kharkov and hasn’t been in Crimea for over a decade. How can this be? The only explanation I have is that the attacker that “cleaned him” then quickly sold his account to someone living in Crimea or used Crimean IP (more on this later) or it was some other error. He sent his passport scan and got unbanned only to get banned again within a day, but this time permanently. He called Blizzard. They said it was for abuse of the item restore feature. Pretty harsh considering he recently got hacked, had to use it, because Blizzard didn’t restore all the gear and has equipped all of that restored FR BoE set, not traded it to someone.
Currently, his character is in the guild, but has been offline for about 2-3 days (cause of the ban). And today, half of our guild has been getting whispers from some level 1 saying: “[Guildie’s character name] is scamming people when selling characters”. This is probably the account’s buyer to which the “hacker” has sold the account.
I already told him to scan his PC with Kaspersky, ideally reformat and get Blizzard Authenticator, but it won’t help him now when he is permanently banned.
Very recently, he became MT and RL of our second raiding team in order to get them on par with the first team. And he did bring them up. So him losing the account this way and quitting (who wouldn’t?) would be a big loss for our guild. Again, he didn’t vanish, he is on our guild’s Discord daily, he got banned for “abuse of item restore system” that he had to use to restore items that weren’t restored by Blizzard after he lost his account.
Can someone from Blizzard take a look into his situation from start to finish and get to the bottom of this?
I won’t be naming names, but in case a Blizzard’s employee sees this, one of his ticket ID’s is #70842938 (Russian region/server).
