Banned for account compromised and cannot play again

Support Customer Support
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Hello all,

I am absolutely appalled at how Blizzard has handled my account’s situation. The fact that I have had this account for approximately 20 years and it is as of this moment permanently banned for a clear error and not one Blizzard staff properly looked into my account makes me completely stunned.

So here is what happened. I started playing WoW again in Classic MoP when it was released and have been playing basically every day. I have never in my entire account history ever broke the rules or had any issues. The last thing I did with my account was on Sunday, August 10 morning clearing 10 man Naxxramas and I got almost every achievement. Around this time I started getting a lot of phishing emails to my email with my account, I never opened them. Then later that same day I got an email from Blizzard saying the following:

“Action(s) Taken: Account Closure

Recent activity shows your account may be compromised. We disabled this account to protect your privacy and prevent further damage.”

I initially thought this was another phishing email somehow but it turns out that my Wow account was banned. What is very strange is that I never got any suspicious login attempts, I have the two factor authentication battle.net app and never got any strange requests. And despite them saying they disabled my account, my battle.net was still accessible, it was only my WoW account that was banned.

Immediately I appealed the ban and selected “I don’t know why I was banned” as I’m sure some kind of error just occurred. I then got the appeal upheld with reason saying:

“An additional review of the action has been completed. We have confirmed our initial findings, and the action will not be reversed or changed.

We understand that you may still have concerns regarding the action, but we must reiterate that it was taken to address a violation of the End User License Agreement (link to EULA), which all players accept before logging into the game.”

The ticket number for this first appeal is Ticket Number: US105789049

I have not even been told what violation I have done, all I have been told is that there was evidence that my account was compromised. From my end there were no successful hacked logins. So my account is now permanently banned for some people having tried to login to my account unsuccessfully?

It didn’t make any sense. After asking for help on the forums on this new account that I am currently posting on, I was told to follow Blizzard’s hacked article which I did.

I followed every step and opened Ticket Number: US105840351 under account hacked as per the article. I was then greeted 3 days ago by a friendly GM message saying the following:

“Thank you for reaching out to us regarding the security concerns with your account. I can completely understand how alarming it must be to receive a notification like that, especially when you’ve never experienced something like this before. It’s great to see you took the proper steps to secure your account, and I’m here to assist in confirming that everything is back on track.

After reviewing your account and performing a deep dive into your Battle.net account, I can confidently tell you that your account appears to be secure. The actions you took, such as changing your password, updating your email, and securing your computer, were absolutely the right ones. These measures have successfully protected your account, and I’m pleased to report that it’s in good standing.”

After reading this, I thought everything was resolved. Then I found out that my WoW account is still banned, and I submitted another appeal under Ticket Number: US105857470 except this time I selected “Compromised Account” as the appeal reason. I also referenced the ticket where a GM told me that my account is in good standing.

Now I was sure that everything would be fixed. But no, just an hour before this post I got my second appeal declined with response:

“Greetings,

This action has been taken in accordance with our Terms of Use and our In-game Policies (link to in-game policies), which all players acknowledge and agree to prior to playing. These policies and conditions allow us to maintain a fun and safe game environment for all of our players.

Our Battle.net Terms of Use can be found at (link to blizzard EULA)”

I now no longer can appeal my permanent ban. What in the world is happening? I have not been told what violation I have done, only that I apparently broke the terms of use somehow despite my only notification being that there was evidence that my account may have been compromised.

At this point I can only guess what the error Blizzard made might be. Because it doesn’t make any sense that this is the process when an account is being attempted to be hacked. So my only possible ideas are that some known hacker/cheater IP addresses were the ones trying to log into my account (again unsuccessfully) and Blizzard somehow thinks that I am those people when I am the victim here. OR, there’s something else that they flagged my account for that I have no clue. I was told that apparently a lot of bots farm Naxxramas 10 man. Could it be that my account was caught in the middle of a bot ban wave that did that? Again I know I have done absolutely nothing wrong, if they look at the logs and evidence of what I did, I cleared every single boss, never reset anything, got all but one achievement, and that was it.

But now I feel like I am in a situation where I am just to say goodbye to my 20 year account with all kinds of things on my retail account and all that I’ve done in classic because Blizzard made some error and no one took the proper time to see that I am completely innocent and my account should be unbanned. I thought I was just going to miss out on a week of raiding Mogushan Vaults, but now it seems I might never get my account back.

If there is a Blizzard staff reading this, please help me somehow, please talk to the people that need to, because I am 1000% confident that if someone does a deep dive into what happened on my account, I am 100% innocent and my account should not be banned. It blows my mind at the way I have been treated so far after being such a loyal and proper playing customer.

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Unfortunately, when it comes to account actions and appeals, those are only handled via the ticket system:
https://us.support.blizzard.com/en/help/restrictions

That said, when we’ve seen this recently, there seems to be a correlation between these account actions and the disputed holder of an account. Meaning, two people fighting to say that this is their account.

Is the account in your legal name? Was the account ever sold/gifted/etc.? You don’t need to answer these here, but that’s the sort of thing that comes up typically in these threads.

Or, someone else has SO much info on you, that they’re able to “prove” that they are the account holder.

Nonetheless, your only option is to appeal via the appropriate system.

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Thank you for responding.

If there were other people disputing my account, there would be other tickets. I am the only person who created tickets and appeals. All from the same computer and IP address. Again no login activity showed anyone else was successful in this.

The only thing you did say that might be the case is that my account has my initials as my first and last name. So instead of being for example “John Smith”, it is “J S”. I created this account back in 2005-2006 when I would have been 11-12 years old and at the time my parents told me to never use my real name online which is why I named myself after my initials. I really hope that something as silly as that is not the reason my account is banned.

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I am not a fan of coincidence, and am getting serious deja vu. Either this is a continuation of the thread from the other day, or we are now seeing the other side of it. Either way, this forum is not a discussion for this topic. The only way to deal with it is via ticket.

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Aside from the fact that as an 11 or 12 year old, you were not allowed to make your own account…yes, that could indeed be the reason.

This also does not rule out that someone may be making tickets, not logged into your account, to argue the account is theirs.

Perhaps when you open your next ticket (if you haven’t already) it may be worth mentioning that you made the account without using your full name.

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Thank you, I will try that.

One thing I do need to ask however. Why is that I still have full access to my battle.net if their concern would be what you mentioned?

I have access to all my other Blizzard games too, it’s only WoW.

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To be fair, I’m only speculating what might be the cause.

Only Blizzard knows what’s going on and they’re not likely to say too much on the forums regarding an account action.

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You have an appeal open currently.

One issue is the account in question seems to have madeup details, and it doesn’t match the account you are posting under.

You’ll want to get that sorted if you can get this resolved.

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Hello,

Thank you so much for responding.

I do see. Once more as I said earlier, as a younger child I was told not give my real information online, I haven’t looked at the address since the account was made around 20 years ago.

I just updated my first and last name to my legal names.

Currently my address’ are not real ones. What would you suggest I do. Should I update them to my current address?

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Yes, your accounts should always have your legal information. That is part of your agreement with us, and in cases like this, that can become very important.

BTW, this doesn’t look compromised.

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Thank you, I’ve just updated everything to my legal information.

I know, like I said, I had no evidence of other logins. But the reason my account was disabled/banned/locked on August 10th was “Recent activity shows your account may be compromised. We disabled this account to protect your privacy and prevent further damage.”

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Looks like this is currently under review, you’ll want to wait on your current ticket.

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Thank you so much for the clarity. I got a little confused because I submitted 2 appeals which are both considered resolved and both ended in result “penalty upheld” and I can’t click the appeal button anymore.

But my ticket for account hacked is still open under Ticket Number: US105840351 which I assume is what you’re referring to.

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How did you update your last name. That is not something Blizzard lets us change ourselves, unless something has changed. Normally you need to send in legal documentation to get the last name updated.

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It was available for me on my Battle.net account details. Maybe it’s because my first and last names were just one letter each?

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I was thinking the exact same thing. Went to my account info just now and the last name field is accessible??? Like, I can change it if I want to. Obviously, I didn’t try as my name is correct.

I wonder if this is an unintended change as it still has a link for:

Please contact Customer Support to update your Name or Country .

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Hi there, long time CS lurker here… though I thought that I’d comment on this.

I just checked my account details as well. It does look like it will let me change both my first and last name. The last time I looked at that screen, the last name was a locked field and required a ticket (with a valid reason) to change. I didn’t actually try to save a change in case this isn’t intended but it did let me edit both of the First Name and Last Name fields.

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According to the support article for the name:

So looks like people can update the names themselves. As for when that might of changed, I dunno, never really had to look at it myself, never needed to update it myself.

Sorry OP if went a little off-topic to your thread.

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Interesting, seems they changed this about 3 months ago based on that note on the article.

Even more of a ramification is that this pretty much allows you to change the owner on the account without Blizzard intervention… as long as you have access to the account.

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That’s true but in my case I changed my full name from initials to the actual name. I think maybe if it turns into a completely different name then Blizzard wouldn’t be as okay with that.