Digital Download Disaster - Solved
Hey all,
I just wanted to share this in case anyone else runs afoul of this, or wants to avoid it in the future.
I decided I was going to do a new wave of RaF. I sent out the five invites and created a new Battle.net account to receive them. Contact info was set up the same. RaF codes were entered and everything had gone smoothly. Since I wanted to level in the Draenei starting area, I decided I would convert the five new accounts to vanilla wow right away.
I went to the Blizzard Online Store and purchased 5 copies of the digital delivery of vanilla Wow. The purchase went through normally and I had the five CD keys in my email. I then added them to the RaF accounts and everything was working smoothly.
Fast forward almost 24 hours and I was leveling a group to 10 for boosting in SFK. Out of the blue (no Blue post pun intended) one of the RaF characters gets disconnected, shortly followed by the second one. Both of my veteran accounts remain connected. I attempt to log the RaF characters back in, but get a message stating that the account had been temporarily suspended or banned.
I check my email on both of the Bnet addresses and have nothing. I then log into the RaF Bnet account and click on manage account. I get an error stating that I can't access that license as it has been "banned, suspended, or locked". There is no information on who to contact or what to do.
I search for the Blizzard number and notice that it has just passed 8pm PST, the whole thing starting approx 8 minutes before phone lines close for the night. I fire off an email to the Account Admin team asking what has happened.
About 30 minutes later I get an email from the Blizzard Store (emphasis mine):
Quote:
Subject: World of Warcraft Digital Game Purchase Failed
Greetings,
This notice is being sent to inform you that we were unable to successfully complete your recent purchase for one or more digital games from the Blizzard Store. The charge for this digital game on your Blizzard Store order was not finalized.
Since we could not fully authorize this item’s purchase, the game license in question has been removed from your Blizzard Account.
For any questions about Blizzard Store orders or your Blizzard account, please contact the Blizzard Billing and Account Services department via telephone at 800-592-5499.
We thank you for your patronage and your patience in this matter.
Regards,
Blizzard Entertainment
I logged on to my banking site and sure enough, Blizzard had reversed the charges and refunded me for the purchase. This was not an issue with my bank or my credit card, this was initiated be Blizzard. Since it was after phone hours, there was nothing I could do but bitch in gchat and then wait until the morning. I had strange dreams that night. I think ret pallies were out to get me.
The following morning I got an email back from Account Admin telling me that I'd need to call Billing and that there wasn't anything they could do. One thing that was strange was that a GM was answering the <wowaccountadmin@blizzard.com> email and all the FAQs and forum posts say GMs can't handle bans and that you need to contact the Account Admin people instead at their special email address. Turns out this special email address goes to GMs... Maybe they are Special Forces GMs.
So I call up the Billing number, which just happens to be the number the Blizzard Store puts on my credit card transaction, so there is no worry of having multiple numbers to call. After a reasonable wait, about 10 minutes, I get to chat with a nice guy that sounds like the person I always get when I call Billing.
So basically the Blizzard system saw the purchase of 5 new accounts that were placed on a new Bnet and thought "hackers". When this happens, they reset the accounts in question, and reverse the purchase. It's automated and they don't send out any notification aside from the reversal note from the store. Luckily the characters on the accounts are fine and the accounts can be reactivated with new keys. The helpful CSR went ahead and made the purchase for me so that it would not be subject to the fraud filters and would be taken care of while I was on the phone. I think the entire call took 25 minutes. He also checked to make sure the RaF link was still active. The only thing the CSR couldn't do was reapply the BC trial to the accounts, but he assured me I could do that form the Bnet account, and was nice enough to send me an email so I could contact him if I had any problems with that.
There is a silver lining in all of this, and that is I got about 24 hours of play time and BC trial for free. It's not much, but it's nice to know that they don't count it against me when their fraud system attacks. Of course maintenance is still going on and I won't be able to confirm anything until it ends.
It's a shame that I got hit by the fraud filter, but I can't have asked for an easier resolution. In all the interactions I've had with Blizzard over the phone, when it was something that they did wrong they have been very helpful in putting things right. I know some people have had hard times with them, but I've generally gotten good responses even when I was at fault.
So that's about it. I just wanted to put this up there in case anyone else runs into something similar. If you plan on doing this, I'd suggest you call up Billing to buy the Vanilla accounts. Just tell them you wanted to avoid the purchase being marked as fraud and that you'd read about it on a forum.
- Souca -
