World Of Warcraft, WoW Hand Armor

Friday, March 18, 2011

"Blizzard" Emails? How to avoid a Scam on your WoW Account


I really hope if you receive these emails, you don't click on anything. Don't get me wrong, I receive about 10 emails a week with folks trying to steal my account. It's actually getting hilarious. I really hope people don't fall for these. Most of them that I receive are like this:

Dear customer,

Due to suspicious activity, your Battle.net account has been locked. You tried to login your account too many times (403). We are concerned about whether your account has been stolen. In order to guarantee the legitimacy of your account, we need you follow these steps:

Step 1: Secure Your Computer
In the event that your computer has been infected with malicious software such as a keylogger or trojan, simply changing your password may not deter future attacks without first ensuring that your computer is free from these programs. Please visit our Account Security website to learn how to secure your computer from unauthorized access.

Step 2: Secure Your E-mail Account
After you have secured your computer, check your e-mail filters and rules and look for any e-mail forwarding rules that you did not create. For more information on securing your e-mail account, visit our Support page.

Step 3: Restore access to Your account
We now provide a secure link for you to verify whether you have taken the appropriate steps to secure the account, your computer, and your email address. Please follow this site to restore the access to your account: XXX.blizzardnet.net

If you still have questions or concerns after following the steps above, feel free to contact Customer Support at XXX.battlenet.net

Sincerely,
The Battle.net Account Team
Online Privacy Policy


Today, I received one better (or worse) than the ones I am used to....Now I would cut and paste this one, but due to all the malicious code imbedded (basically you click anywhere in the email and you go to some "scaaary" site, I had to screenshot...



 As you can see, they get quite sneaky to try to get your account information from you. This is ugly. I can see how the "uninformed" have lost their account, had someone log into your account, bla, bla, bla.

The funniest part of this one is the "If you are so lucky that you can won our mysterious prize and 5000 gold or a free Blizzard Authenticator". Really? Come on...

Some people will say "Change your email to one you don't use for anything else, just your account". To this I say "Why?". I have spoke to GM's in game, on the phone, and through email on these. I forward every email that I get to them. Blizz admin told me to ignore ANYTHING from ANYONE in my email. There are very, very, very few times they will "suspend" your account due to you not responding....

* Flashing Lights here if I knew how to do it.....

BLIZZARD WILL NOT EMAIL YOU TO CHANGE ANYTHING. EVER....DON'T CLICK.....

BLIZZARD WON'T LOCK YOUR ACCOUNT EVEN IF YOU DON'T RESPOND TO A LEGIT EMAIL.

I was told there are very few reasons they will email you....

#1. If you email them first.
#2. If you signed up for a battle.net contest- I was advised to call the 800 number to speak with an actual blizzard rep when this happens (last month, I actually did win one through their twitter contest).
#3. For a lock/ban/suspension of your account (once again, call to verify. Only get the number from the actual website you log into at battle.net).

These are just examples that I was given, I am sure there are more, but do not trust what people say, or email, or /tell, or whatever. If your account is as valuable to you as mine is to me, then CALL THEM DIRECT. Talk to a real human being. Find out whatever issue you have or are experiencing. That is truly the only way to know for sure that you are clear (and NEVER call a phone number that is emailed to you- use the number at battle.net where you log into services).

I know I capped quite a few words here and there, I am just trying to get the point across. I hope I did.

11 comments:

Anonymous said... Reply To This Comment

You know, I always get a kick out of these types of emails. It cracks me up that they use language such as "dismays," "unscrupulous," and "pillage," yet they haven't mastered even the most basic elements of grammar and syntax.

Watch out! They will make a investigate! And, they hope that, in the future, you'll have offered more suggestions in the past.

Classic stuff.

-Cort

Anonymous said... Reply To This Comment

You'll get an email from Blizzard if you pay for something too, but it will only be your billing/shipping confirmation so no reason to bother clicking on anything anyway.

The best spam mails I've seen are ones that actually take the time to replicate the look of Blizzards website within the email itself. They're very convincing, but a quick mouse-over on any of the links will show you where they're really trying to send you.

After I saw that email, as I was nearly convinced until the mouse-over, I just filter all things Blizzard related directly to trash and ignore it all.

Admin said... Reply To This Comment

@ Cort and Psynister,

Thanks for the info guys, I appreciate the comments. It seems that alot of people get these. I didn't know that it was so common.

Hopefully everyone is smarter than the "scammers", however I believe that quite a few folks have fallen for these. I am hoping that this post might save one or two peeps out there from getting scammed. =)

Anonymous said... Reply To This Comment

I got the following email a couple months ago - NEVER EVER EVER give out your password unless you have accessed battle.net directly through your browser (not via a link). The only time Blizz has asked me to click through a link in my email is when I activated the Remote Auction House. The instructions explicitly told me this email was coming.

These scammers are not all retarded, some of them look very legit. I had doubts about this one, so I emailed Blizz's anti-hack group over it. I asked them to let me know if it was legit so that I wouldn't lose my account. I never got a response, so I trashed the email. Here's the email I got:

Greetings,

It has come to our attention that you are trying to sell your personal World of Warcraft account(s). As you may not be aware of, this conflicts with the EULA and Terms of Agreement. If this proves to be true, your account can and will be disabled. It will be ongoing for further investigation by Blizzard Entertainment's employees. If you wish to not get your account suspended you should immediately verify your account ownership.

You can confirm that you are the original owner of the account to this secure website with:
LINK REMOVED

Login to your account, In accordance following template to verify your account.


If you ignore this mail your account can and will be closed permanently.

Once we verify your account, we will reply to your e-mail informing you that we have dropped the investigation.

Regards,
Account Administration Team
Blizzard Entertainment
LINK REMOVED
World of Warcraft , Blizzard Entertainment 2011

Admin said... Reply To This Comment

Thanks for sharing that Stede. Much Appreciated!

Nev said... Reply To This Comment

@Stede - I get that one maybe 2 or 3 times a week & numerous others too. I find that if you just mouseover the link, it will look like Blizzard address until you look closely - things like biizzard or bliizard - at a quick glance, it looks legit but look at those duplicate letters & stuff - I never ever click anything :)

Anonymous said... Reply To This Comment

My favorite phishing email:

In view of recent, we have received too many from other players on your complaint we must to verify your account.please login http://LINKREMOVED as soon as possible with our current inspection or we will lock your account, forever.

Regards,
Blizzard Inc.

Vayaz said... Reply To This Comment

I remember that the first time I received an email stating that my account was banned for gold selling, I almost believed it.

Since I had started the gold-making business only recently and was sitting on my first 100k or something, the message shocked me at first, but then I noticed that I had just logged in with my "banned" account 5 minutes before checking my e-mails.

Kammler said... Reply To This Comment

I get about 10 of these a week. They go to my spam folder.

For a kick, for about 10 days I forwarded every one of them to the Blizzard Spam report email address on their website. I stopped when I got a personal email asking me to stop. 'We know this is a problem for our subscribers'. lol

Also, in gmail I was able to see the actual origination email address which was always hotmail or something. Blizz emails say 'Blizzard' in the return address.

amalgam said... Reply To This Comment

More tips to protect yourself:

--Never click on links in emails.
--Use Firefox or Google Chrome with AdBlock Plus installed.
--Use the NoScript extension for Firefox (and Chrome, too, I think).
--Use a different password for WoW than everything else. MAKE SURE IT'S A SECURE PASSWORD. Use a fake word, use numbers, use upper- and lowercase letters, use symbols (yes, Blizzard lets you use some symbols) and, if allowed, use an ASCII or Cyrillic character as well. The ASCII/Cyrillic character also adds an additional layer of security versus someone that may be watching you type. They see you hit 4 or 5 keys and may not catch the fact that you're holding a modifier to make those 4 or 5 keys only produce one character.

My quick and dirty password guide: use the name of two or three objects that you see nearby. Take half of each of those words (phone and desk in this example) and combine those halves, replacing a letter or two with a symbol. For every new half that gets inserted into the password, start that half with a capital letter. Then choose a number that means something to you. I like to use 1970 (first inkling of the internet being created). Split the number in half and reverse one half. Put one part at the beginning of the password and the other part at the end.

So, phone + desk + 1970 becomes 07PhoK$eD19 when you replace the "S" with a "$". I guarantee "phok$ed" appears nowhere in any dictionary. Ever. Google it.

--Download Sandboxie. It's a sandbox for any program you choose. What this accomplishes is anything that gets downloaded to your PC automatically while browsing the internet (temporary internet files, common cookies, common images like Google's logo on their home page, etc.) instead gets put into a quarantined area of RAM. You can clear that quarantine anytime you like and when you close the associated program, the RAM quarantine gets cleared. You can manually flag something to be saved normally so you can still download things as you would under normal circumstances.
--Update antivirus, blah blah.
--When you download something and are unsure of the source's trustworthiness, upload the file(s) to virustotal.org or virscan.org. They are online virus scanners that run 40+ engines on files and spit out results.
--Get CCleaner from Pearsoft. Download it and save it someplace unusual. Rename the CCleaner.exe to something else (like a person's name, gibberish, etc.) then run it. Hit Analyze and let it clean.
--Download Killbox. Save it someplace else unusual and rename it to gibberish as well. Run it; if it shows anything unusual running as a process, Google the name of the process and use your best judgment to kill it.
--Download HijackThis! if you still feel unsafe. Save it someplace unusual, rename it. Run it and upload the result to any number of forums that provide tech support for cleaning out adware, spyware, etc.
--If you have browser toolbars installed from AOL, Yahoo!, Google, Pando, NBC, AIM, FarmVille/FrontierVille/Zanga, Facebook, Adobe, etc. REMOVE THEM. Many of them allow unsigned controls to be run at will and can be exploited to load corrupted DLLs onto your system. Do not use these. Ever. Never. Swear on it. In blood.

jerseysteve said... Reply To This Comment

Make sure you turn on long headers when you get these emails and you can see that they come from gmail.com or yahoo.com or a lot of other places that aren't Blizzard. That is the easiest way to see if you've gotten a phishing attempt (works for your bank/CC/etc too). And I always forward them on to hacks@blizzard.com just to be safe.

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