Old account recovery, lost authenticator

I’m returning to wow after being away for some years. I’ve lost the physical authenticator that I had but I have the original email and password.

i tried to log in and it accepted my info and asked me to enter the authenticator key. i’ve made a ticket from my free account but it was canceled. ive also tried to do web tickets but i’ve not heard anything from blizz at all in my email.

i don’t remember how many years i’ve been away, maybe two years or even three. do they delete accounts after a certain amount of time ?

Tickets can’t be cancelled without a reply. Web tickets go into the same queue as in-game tickets too.

I’d recommend checking your ticket status here:
https://us.battle.net/support/en/case/

As long as you’ve put in a ticket under the option for removing an authenticator and have attached ID, you should be good. Just have to wait for your ticket to hit the front of the queue. Tickets are at about 24 hours currently.

Nope. They never delete accounts or characters :wink:

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thank you perl.

as for the canceled ticket, it shows up in my ticket archive as canceled. never heard a word about it till I checked back and saw it had a red x by it.

in any event i’ll wait till I hear from blizz in my email, I appreciate your response!

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Generally speaking, this is true. However, our support systems have evolved over the last few years so there may be situations where an automated ticket system fails and the ticket is canceled.

For example, if you try to use a self service tool to remove the authenticator but it stalls or you close the window before the service returns a “Approved”/“Denied” response then the attempted ticket will get canceled. Similar issues can happen with other self service tool like the Stuck Character webform - that’s technically creating an automated ticket.

Blakkbiird, it looks like you may have been attempting a self service authenticator removal ticket from your current account but since this new account isn’t using the authenticator it may be causing the self service tool to fail.

If you haven’t done so already, log out of your Blizzard account and use this link to submit a ticket:

https://battle.net/support/help/product/services/316/977/solution

You may be prompted to login, but it’s not required. You’ll be given a form to provide the email address of the Blizzard account that has the Authenticator. Then you’ll be prompted with some different verification options. Those may include:

  • Text Message verification: If you have Blizzard Phone Notifications setup on the account, you can use a text message to remove the authenticator.
  • Authenticator Verification: If you still have the authenticator, you can use the code generated to remove it (I know you don’t have it in this case, this form just provides the option in case a user does)
  • ID verification: If you do not have phone notifications, or the authenticator then you can submit a ticket with an image of your ID to serve as verification.
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Thank you very much, i’ve been running in circles! i’ll try that link. I have some info on my old account but I’ve long lost my old physical authenticator.

Thanks for your time, its appreciated!

Edit: I finally got a solid support ticket through with a ticket number this time. I never received a number before. that link evidently was the trick. the support system is very convoluted if your not used to it!

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