So I got hacked...my own fault but damn what a pita

[Otlecs]

I really don't understand why a hacker would delete characters.

It's sheer bloody-mindedness, and gives an interesting insight into the mindset of the people who do this. They're not just doing it for business reasons - they really are nasty bastards who want to hurt people.

I personally know somebody who had their account hacked and all of their toons were logged in falling to the ground from Dalaran. Naked, obviously.

I've also heard anecdotal evidence of people logging in to find themselves deep under water with a couple of seconds' breath left, and dying of fatigue because they've been logged out so far from land.

It's just the final twist of the virtual knife from the cowardly scum-sucking pieces of shit that do this sort fo thing because they can't get a real job.

Honestly, IF I would ever have considered buying gold in the past, there's no way I would EVER even give it a moment's consideration since I first starting hearing about account hacks a couple of years ago.

So, yeah, really bad luck there Zamok, and even more worrying when you don't know exactly how they got the information to move that fast.

I hope Blizz manage to restore everything for you, and I hope the sweat-shop-dwelling, yellow-bellied losers who did it burn in hell.

[Fef]

I had one of my accounts hacked some months ago. The job was done very "cleanly". All that could be sold or DE'ed had been, and one of my characters (level 80 hunter) was apparently used for illegal stuff (teleporting here and there, I could "track" him from another account). For the rest, everything was left intact.

I still don't know how they could not get all my five accounts, though. They had plenty of time, account names were (still are actually) almost identical, passwords were the same ...

Anyway, Blizzard did a great job at restoring everything, and it went fairly fast. In 3 days, i was up and running. So, message of hope to the OP : it will end good

[Oswyn]

It's been a couple years since I got my accounts hijacked. I now have the authenticator, but I'm still so paranoid that I don't use my gaming computer to log into any email or banking sites.

[Gadzooks]

It all depends on who steals the account. Most keyloggers are from China or Indonesia, it seems, while the e-mail phishers are US based players (and Canada, they think they're immune from prosecution).

I could see the US thieves deleting characters, because if you go to sites where they hang out, they're all 13-18 year old anti-social snots.

The Chinese thieves are efficient. It's just a job to them. They tend to keep the high level toons to run bots in Wintergrasp, but I could see them deleting characters because the established characters would be too noticable to guildies and friends?

Anyway, sorry to hear you got hacked. This is the number one reason I have not installed WoW on my Windows Bootcamp yet, because I need to sit down and work out the best security plan I can. I have the WoW Authenticator on my iPhone, too, but after the last round of screwups, I'm holding off on that too.

[Marious]

Never click on an email link unless you know for sure what its about, if you have even a spec of doubt, dont do it!!! That's how they get most people, I only look at emails from people I know and I do not click on anything in them! And they say I am paranoid, well I am but that's neither here nor there, stuff that happens to my fellow boxers makes it ok for me to be paranoid

[daviddoran]

My guess s ther they delete toons after stripping to mark which they have already been to, so they can move faster.

I was a young newb once and bought powerleveling, then got hacked, probably from the same people, so I learned my lesson. People who still buy gold at this point are just as guilty as the sellers and hackers. String em up I say!

[heffner]

You know what's sad? My WoW account has better security than my online bank account.

[thinus]

How do they "launder" the gold/gems though? Do they send the gold by mail to lots of different characters? Trade in game with other characters?

Theoretically Blizzard must be able to retrace the flow of the stolen property and ban all accounts involved. You would think they would examine the way in which they operate and come up with changes in how we trade in the game to complicate, block and easily track the techniques these bastards use.

I can see how a large amount of micro transactions can be generated to complicate tracking them and if they randomly include some legitimate accounts then you cannot just wield the ban stick with wild abandon. But they can also have only so many accounts under their control and once Blizzard flags an account as compromised all trades with that account becomes suspicious immediately.

They should also be able to detect a pattern in compromised accounts (the systematic stripping of characters) and if that is combined with a recent password reset on the account then maybe they should put a 24hr or 48hr block on that account to see if they are contacted about the account being stolen.

But instead of addressing the issue on their side they push it down to us requiring us to buy hardware from them. Much like their AFK flagging solution in BGs.

[Gorkette]

Just thought I would add another point to consider. Authenticators will still not 100% protect you. The code on the authenticator is valid for about 20-30 seconds. Logging into non-official websites using your authenticator can compromise your account, if they are fast enough to log in before the code resets.

[Solon]

Authenticator ordered, now that I actually have someone around to receive it when it arrives. I have been told that even typing delete and deleting a character from the realm does not delete it from the servers for quite some time. I'm sure Blizz will be able to restore your toons.
Somehow I felt that a Battlenet account was less secure than 5 old accounts.
Good Luck