Seeing the same spammers all the time is actually a disincentive to report. It comes across as nothing is being done.
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That’s why they do it. You aren’t seeing the same spammers all the time because they ARE dealt with, usually in minutes. But they recreate the same name on another stolen account usually in less than a minute after the one they’re using gets shut down.
Then they actually have people posting on the forums claiming “reporting doesn’t work” to actually get fewer people to report, which lets them spam longer.
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Its a multi billion dollar buissness the blame falls on the 0layer base for looking for the easy way out instead of earning it rhe hard way. Untill people stop looking for the easy way out there will be cockroaches taking advantage of the stuoid and gullible.
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Are you sure about that? How many stolen accounts do they have?
Someone above posted that these thieves have “HUNDREDS of thousands of stolen accounts”. If that is true, then we really need to question how many subscribers WoW actually has.
Which is why I don’t believe that. I think they are just logging off and logging back on to wash away the silence.
Not likely relevant if an account is compromised. Either the account was already active, or the hacker used other means to fund the account long enough to spam before the account is squelched or silenced. It’s not unusal a hacked account spammer to also use invalid or harvested credit card information to active a inactive account. It’s usually a transaction that is eventually declined, but can give them quite a bit of spam potential.
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I think there is a simple fix…
The machine ID that is displayed at the top of a Dxdiag report… Should be the security check that flashes up the box when you log back in. I have no idea what they are checking now.
If the ID does not match… The last log in.
The account needs to verified by SMS to answer why the ID does not match.
Just a idea…
Um, you realize you can easily change that in 2 seconds if you want to right? It’s trivial. That’s like saying IP blocking can be effective. That would only inconvenience paying customers who play on more than one machine, while not even slowing the gold sellers down.
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You could tell them you are going to use two, or more machines and supply them while you are log into battle.net
That would not affect anyone.
Can be spoofed
not everyone has an SMS-enabled phone. There are threads in CS about players not able to set up SMS because sone number blocks are set as pay-as-you-go and can’t be used.
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You’d think if the fix was really that simple it would have been implemented already.
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That… isn’t how a silence or squelch work… at all.
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Hacked or stolen - or even just paid for via tokens/RMT. If they can ban 120k+ a month, that hundreds of thousands is probably lowballing it.
This has no bearing on anything? Blizzard has chosen not to disclose their sub numbers officially since 2015. Any numbers you see slung around are people spitballing or guessing or heavens only know how they pull that number from their rear end. Unless it’s released officially by Blizzard, it doesn’t mean anything. And even then it still doesn’t matter in this context.
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Yeah I was probably lowballing it a little. Some of the really large gold selling organizations (and they are organizations, run by organized crime cartels, this is a multi billion dollar per year business) do indeed have hundreds of thousands or more accounts ready to go at a moment’s notice.
And it doesn’t matter if they are active or not. They activate them with stolen credit cards. Sometimes stolen from their “customers”, sometimes stolen from people that don’t even play WOW via phishing or whatever.
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That was 120K in June. Can you show me where they banned 100K+ in July? In August? Just so I can see that this large ban was not a one-off.
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If you are looking for native links to the posts listed in what Kaleberry linked:
Keep in mind, while we have been recently posting some of the numbers involved in our actions, we may not always be able to report all of them.
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That was helpful. Thanks.
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Others have helpfully provided more than just the one. It’s not difficult to take the moment to research things yourself rather than depending on other folks or speaking without having a point of reference. Especially on this forum so that the information being shared is accurate - when it isn’t so much the case on other forums.
The misinformation and woefully uneducated (in the processes/information regarding WoW and Blizzard - not speaking as to mental acuity in any way, shape or form) is something battled here every single day. But all of that kind of information is out there if folks would take a moment to step away from Reddit or other unmoderated cesspools to see the truth of the matter. When something is said that is incorrect, folks here will correct a person - be they other player, forum regular or even sometimes our SFAs. 
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Alright, I think this is getting increasingly unproductive.
Thanks, all.
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