The Worst World of Warcraft Account Hack Ever!

My World of Warcraft account got hacked.

And I am conflicted about it.

My World of Warcraft subscription, at the time of the hack, was cancelled. I played the game for over three years, and the grind was getting to me. I needed a break, so I decided to cancel the subscription until a new expansion came along, and I went off to play CounterStrike: Source.

I hadn’t really thought about it until I decided to login one night, sure that I still had some time left before the account was put on the digital shelf, and I could not get in.

I was certain that my system was not compromised.

Anti-virus shows nothing, no malware, no bots, no trojans. I ran a bunch of other security tools: nothing. That does not mean there was not some malware on my system when I closed the account. I reformatted recently, so we will never know what method the hacker used to get my account information.

Someone got my login when Blizzard made the shift to Battle.net, and used their email address for the account name.  They used their own, or a stolen, credit card number.

It took all of 30 minutes on the phone with the customer service staff at Blizzard to get that fixed.

Great people, in case you are wondering.

Then I waited for the account to be restored. And waited. And waited.

I was more worried about whether I had lost 3 years worth of work than if Blizzard was going to do the right thing and restore the account.

Last night, I got the account back.

<The next bit is really geeky. You might want to look away. Go make coffee or something.>

As I logged in, I was greeted by my character MateoTG (Blackhand), Night Elf  Warrior, but  with a totally different look and name.

Instead of level 76 Protection, he was now Becomes, the level 80 Fury, sporting two gigantic two hand weapons. It is, to be honest, a bad ass look.

Becomes, as he is now called, had been all over the map. His quest log was full of Battlefields and Daily Quests.

The original gear had all been auctioned off. That was a given. My original character was specced to stand there and take damage. A straight Tank. Not at all good for a Fury specced Warrior. The shield I worked so hard to get? Pawned off somewhere. The armor that I slaved to get? Gone. Now everything he had was geared towards generating as much damange as possible.

He was peniless, save for bags full of auctionable gear.

He was, however, at the level 80 cap, and he had a flying mount. As I had neither of those things, in a sense the Hacker did me a favor.

There was a second character on my account, UnholyMatea, a level 60 DeathKnight.

I never really go into playing a DeathKnight. After the beginning area (which was AWESOME), the grind to level 80 looked daunting, so I parked her in Stormwind and forgot about her.

I wondered what the hacker did with her, so I logged in.

Lo and behold, she was exactly as I left her, save for bags of loot and gold. The hacker was using UnholyMatea as a mule, parking loot and cash there until they could mail it off somewhere.

So I now have a level 80 character, a flying mount, a bunch of gold, and bags of stuff to auction off.

<You can start reading now.>

I should feel violated.

My account was used by someone else for a couple of months! Who knows what they did under my name?

On the other hand, the hacker saved me a ton of work getting to level 80, and getting the gold for the flying mount.

I thought the whole point of hacking a World of Warcraft account was to basically leave the player with a character worse off than when you gained access? A digital rape?

Other than having to respec, and check my credit reports, I’m better off with the character as he is now.

So thanks mystery hacker: You just committed the worst world of warcraft account hack ever!

Now drop dead.

Tagged as: blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, gaming, World of Warcraft, worldofwarcraft