For several months now, my friends, raid group members and I have been getting scamming whispers from a misspelled “Bliizard” account FOR MONTHS now. The same character name on the same server. It is the usual impersonation stuff, with a phishing URL included.
We have all reported the name and the whispers over the past several months, but nothing is being done, we still get these whispers on a daily basis.
It would hide the whispers, but it wouldn’t address the issue that apparently scammers can be active for literally months before any action is taken. This individual has been doing this for at least four months now on the same account.
I didn’t ignore this scammer because I want to see how long scammers can do this on the same account before something is done. I’m just perplexed that reports even for very clear-cut scamming aren’t processed, not even by an AI. (And that “Bliizard” and other variations aren’t blocked.)
They probably rely upon you using the ignore function as they gather evidence for their next ban wave. There simply aren’t going to be enough people in Blizz to ban every single person needing it everyday. If there is a game that does, I’d love to know how.
They generally get squelched after receiving a large amount of reports for their obnoxious scamming attempt and then recreate a variation of the name to continue doing this. Once a GM comes to it and bans the account they just create a new account and continue doing it again.
This type of scam was already here since the dawn of WoW btw. I recommend the badboy and/or extended version to filter and one click report them.
Do you know other live service games where you can try to scam players in a large scale fashion like this, with an URL for a phishing site that has been set up quite a while ago and that actually has “blizzard” in the domain name, for months on the same account, before something happens?
My expectation isn’t that every individual report is manually looked at, even though I’m relatively sure that back when we still had real GMs most reports were actually read by humans. But this scamming account has probably been reported hundreds of times over the course of months, and that should get a timely response.
I feel the ignore command is a good tool for social conflicts or the occasional spammer, but in a case like this it’s a bit like just shoving the smelly garbage under the couch and pretending the house is clean. A bit of a pacifier.
I know other MMOs have spammers and scammers but I report and ignore as with anything. I don’t know the ins and outs of how it works and I’d certainly like it to be faster, it’s definitely frustrating especially with the bot farms… I just don’t know what we can do about it really. I’m clearly not helping the situation though so maybe someone else will come along with a better idea.
Been a while since I’ve actually seen a fake Blízzurd whisper actually… Just keep reporting them and know that they do get actioned but you never get told about it.
Still prefer this scam over the guy that kept chasing me even with dragonflight flying mounts to beg me for gold… 100k gold like wth… and it had that blue owl everyone has, just buy a token then and don’t bother ppl…
Just remember as well that whenever Blizzard contacts you, you will get a window appearing saying that a GM wishes to speak to you.
Also, all Blizzard accounts that speak to you will have the “Blizz” icon next to their name.
If people fall victim to this scam, sure it sucked. But it’s also about keeping yourself updated on account security (authenticators) and not using the same password for every single account on the interwebs.
I havent seen them for a while, but now they begin to whisper again. I think it is because they know blizzard arent doing against it.
Remember when blizz wrote that they will ban players who made wts groups? 2 days after that blue tread noone dared to make wts groups, now look what happend.