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

[Khatovar]

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

The *only* thing I can think of for deleting the characters is maybe, possibly they think they can get more business that way? I guess they think people are stupid enough to say "I got all my shit taken and my toons deleted because of some random asshole, I don't want to start all over, so I'll pay this power leveling company to level a new toon for me." *shrug* Never underestimate the lengths people will go to to be utterly and mindnumbingly stupid?

Unless it takes longer to get toons back from a full delete as opposed to just restoring gear? I don't know, never been through it. I guess they could think that if the Blizz GMs have to spend X amount of time restoring a deleted toon and replacing the gear/money whatever, they {the account thieves} have longer before Blizz tracks them and the stolen currency down? Though I was under the impression that restores of that magnitude ended up as pretty much just toon rollbacks instead of having to research and replace.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

The *only* thing I can think of for deleting the characters is maybe, possibly they think they can get more business that way? I guess they think people are stupid enough to say "I got all my shit taken and my toons deleted because of some random asshole, I don't want to start all over, so I'll pay this power leveling company to level a new toon for me." *shrug* Never underestimate the lengths people will go to to be utterly and mindnumbingly stupid?

Unless it takes longer to get toons back from a full delete as opposed to just restoring gear? I don't know, never been through it. I guess they could think that if the Blizz GMs have to spend X amount of time restoring a deleted toon and replacing the gear/money whatever, they {the account thieves} have longer before Blizz tracks them and the stolen currency down? Though I was under the impression that restores of that magnitude ended up as pretty much just toon rollbacks instead of having to research and replace.

Coming from a PC software background, I would guess the character deletion is probably done to increase efficiency. Let us postulate the following about account hackers and their methods:

• Efficiency is king.
• The more accounts they can hack and process into adbots or gold-accumulation bots the better.
• A person is much slower than a software-automated process.
• Software automation for fixed GUI elements is easy. Software automation for randomized GUI elements is much harder.

Presuming that, it follows that they would write their post-hack account processing software so it does a few things:

• Find all current characters in your character list on your most populated 10 servers (the game automagically sorts the server list so they show the ones where you have the most toons)
• Log into the level 80s, disenchant or sell all BoP stuff or worthless BoE stuff to the nearest vendor and send any resulting gold to a designated level 1 "clearinghouse" alt for that server.
• Repeat for the level 80's guild if they have access.
• Rinse and repeat for all other characters on those top 3-10 realms. Hell, might only need to do the top realm as most people only play on one realm. (Remember: efficiency is king.)
• Delete the char from slot X (whichever the processing software is set to use for its advertising/transferring) on every realm where a char exists in that slot.
• Create level 1s with random gibberish names in slot X.
• Advertise or transfer gold/gear/etc. on the level 1s on as many servers as possible.

I'd presume that's the basic method for generating the most "work" from a hacked account as possible within the short time period they usually last before getting banned.

[Gadzooks]

Coming from a PC software background, I would guess the character deletion is probably done to increase efficiency. Let us postulate the following about account hackers and their methods:

• Efficiency is king.
• The more accounts they can hack and process into adbots or gold-accumulation bots the better.
• A person is much slower than a software-automated process.
• Software automation for fixed GUI elements is easy. Software automation for randomized GUI elements is much harder.

Presuming that, it follows that they would write their post-hack account processing software so it does a few things:

• Find all current characters in your character list on your most populated 10 servers (the game automagically sorts the server list so they show the ones where you have the most toons)
• Log into the level 80s, disenchant or sell all BoP stuff or worthless BoE stuff to the nearest vendor and send any resulting gold to a designated level 1 "clearinghouse" alt for that server.
• Repeat for the level 80's guild if they have access.
• Rinse and repeat for all other characters on those top 3-10 realms. Hell, might only need to do the top realm as most people only play on one realm. (Remember: efficiency is king.)
• Delete the char from slot X (whichever the processing software is set to use for its advertising/transferring) on every realm where a char exists in that slot.
• Create level 1s with random gibberish names in slot X.
• Advertise or transfer gold/gear/etc. on the level 1s on as many servers as possible.

I'd presume that's the basic method for generating the most "work" from a hacked account as possible within the short time period they usually last before getting banned.

You may be right, a lot of the gold spammers lately have been <charactername>wsjdka, which could be software tagging a level 80, stripping it, then erasing it and creating a spammer character.

[Iceorbz]

your characters dont get deleted, only hidden and rolled down off the page. They have to be innactive forever and under level 10 i believe to really be dleeted.

[Drizhal]

They launder the cash but the problem is, as many have said people are incredibly dense. They do not report things for multiple days/weeks, or they rarely play and don't report it. They were doing something against the rules so they don't report it for fear of being banned. So out of every lets say 50 accounts 10 people don't report it due to multiple reasons. They still have hijacked 10, in my case they charged my CC to xfer my 80 DK and unload all the crap (Also got a name change....why i ono...)

But anyways none got deleted, just fast and efficient ransacking. I think as others have said deleted toons are a proverbial twist of the knife...Toons 60+ Are never actually deleted off their servers (blizzards) even if you deactive your account (though I would be very hard pressed to test their claim). Anything under 60 will EVENTUALLY disappear but takes months.

But I am stalling converting the rest of my accounts into a BNet, I plan to use 2 bnets...why...I dono just cause 5 is to many and 1 seems to few but there is a silver lining to the Bnet, With a keylogger before hackers owned you completely once they got your pw and you retrieved it with the secret question, because it is impossible to change it, even through blizzard customer support. SO, if you ever do get hacked, you know you can actually change that secret question to help lock them out. Somewhat comforting....somewhat


Also I received this morning an email from blizzard report thanking me for submitting my ticket however....my email was changed away from my hotmail emai labout 5 months ago...it looked completely legit too

[Dramoth]

As I said elsewhere, a close friend of mine got hacked somehow...

He noticed it when he tried to log in (he plays every day) and he doesnt check his email account all that often tbh.

He did notice that he received an email from blizzard saying that they had merged his account with his battle.net account and gave his email address login name as XXXXXXX@yahoo.cr.

I said to him that it sounded like he had been hacked so we checked his armory profile for his level 80 toon and checked on wow-heroes.com to see what had happened to his toon... he only had a few epics left (mostly pvp and badge stuff, they didnt DE those). I had logged in to try and draw the attention of a GM to it because my mate doesnt get in until after 6pm GMT every day. I still had my mate on the phone talking to him as I logged in and shortly after logging in, I got a system message that [character] has logged in.

Told my mate that and he was going 'that aint me'... so I really ramped up trying to get hold of a GM and I think that I did get a GM who was playing his normal toon on a different server because I told him my mates toon's name and he came back and said that it looked like it was a bot.

Next thing that I know, my mates account has been logged out and new passwords have been sent to his email address. It appears that they didnt manage to compromise his email account.

I logged in to check and see if the hackers had got into a GB banker that he has and fortunately they didnt even try and access the low level toon... because everything was still in the GB.

In the end, he came out of the whole experience a wiser and (in game) richer man... they had been using his lvl 80 as a mining bot and he had about 100 stacks of saronite ore and 20 stacks of titanium ore. He got all his gear back minus the gems and chants.

I do believe that he has now setup his own battle.net account, but I dont know whether he has gone for an authenticator as well... next time I see him, I will talk to him about it

[Gadzooks]

They launder the cash but the problem is, as many have said people are incredibly dense. They do not report things for multiple days/weeks, or they rarely play and don't report it. They were doing something against the rules so they don't report it for fear of being banned. So out of every lets say 50 accounts 10 people don't report it due to multiple reasons. They still have hijacked 10, in my case they charged my CC to xfer my 80 DK and unload all the crap (Also got a name change....why i ono...)

But anyways none got deleted, just fast and efficient ransacking. I think as others have said deleted toons are a proverbial twist of the knife...Toons 60+ Are never actually deleted off their servers (blizzards) even if you deactive your account (though I would be very hard pressed to test their claim). Anything under 60 will EVENTUALLY disappear but takes months.

But I am stalling converting the rest of my accounts into a BNet, I plan to use 2 bnets...why...I dono just cause 5 is to many and 1 seems to few but there is a silver lining to the Bnet, With a keylogger before hackers owned you completely once they got your pw and you retrieved it with the secret question, because it is impossible to change it, even through blizzard customer support. SO, if you ever do get hacked, you know you can actually change that secret question to help lock them out. Somewhat comforting....somewhat


Also I received this morning an email from blizzard report thanking me for submitting my ticket however....my email was changed away from my hotmail emai labout 5 months ago...it looked completely legit too

Name and server changing was a favorite thing of snot nosed US players, so they could sell the character - Bnet has pretty much put that market in the toilet, thank god.

If you have ANY plans to move characters around your accounts, use one Bnet. It's fine, I use one for all of mine. It will be a lot easier with one.

[Dramoth]

I am thinking of creating a 6th .eu account and moving all my important toons to that and having that under a different b.net account...

However, I like having all my toons on my current account setup as it makes it nice and easy to boost other toons easily.

[Iceorbz]

I wish that they would just allow authenticator for specific functions: ie anything that charges money to the cards.

Its annoying for me to login for the amount of times I open and close things I dunno.