I received an email that was completely random last night. The email was an offer for a bunch of free stuff, if I was willing to retry World of Warcraft. It was from Blizzard, but triggered by someone in the game who I never heard of.
Apparently, someone had managed to get my Battle.net password and was using my account to get some time in WoW. This is now the second time this has happened to me, which is a bit strange because the first time was due to gold farmers looking to sell gold in game for real world cash. After learning that my Blizzard account was banned, I had to go through a process to confirm that I was who I said I was, and they reversed the ban. Oddly, the ones who hacked my account didn’t take the 370 gold that was on my main character… Lazy farmers I guess.
This time they just created a new character on a server I have never played before, and joined a guild. Timing is everything in these, because ironically they were trying to play it at the exact same time that I was. I kept getting booted off the game, so I figure we were fighting each other to be online. Now, since they probably would have no use for actually adding game time to my account, I can only guess that it was an effort to steal all of the stuff Blizzard gives you after they “quick-level” the chosen character to level 80. They were mid-flight when I finally got permanent access to the account (by adding an authenticator, and a VERY strong randomized password.) So I may have caught them just before they were going to make the trade. Again, they left my main character alone.
I just don’t see the purpose in all of this, because if your goal is to make money, why limit yourself to one side of things and not take it all? One could argue that I probably wouldn’t notice if they left the base characters alone, but with an offer like this hitting my mailbox, how could I NOT try and claim it? It was called a Scroll of Resurrection. So if anyone was wondering if this is a legit offer… It is!
Here’s what I was told I would get:
- Free permanent upgrade to the Cataclysm expansion (along with the 2 prior ones)
- Choose one character to auto-level (or quick-level if you prefer) to 80, which apparently came with all the gear you would need to get started at that level
- Free transfer service: You can move the selected character to the same server as the person who invited you.
- Free faction change: You could change to the faction of the invitee if you needed to.
- 7 days of free game time
When I saw that, I was like “Cool, I can make my character on Skywall level 80, and actually be able to play the game; and I get the 2 expansions I don’t already have for free. Let’s go!”
With the account secured now, I am hoping to get the hacker’s character deleted and have the quick-level put on my main character. At the very least I am hoping they will move the new character to Skywall so I can at least have it on my original world.
Sorry, not something I would usually write about, but this whole process baffles and annoys me. That’s why I don’t have all the pictures like I normally do, I had to say something and this is more of a rant than a real post… Speaking of which, I should probably change my WordPress password too.
