Your friends told you wrong, I’m afraid. Just to clarify - if they were moved, they were on a realm that was deleted to try and consolidate some of the lower population servers. Your characters would not have been moved from a server that was remaining. They did not just up and move characters willy nilly, only those from certain servers that were slated for deletion. Active or inactive, if they were on Whitemane, they would not have been touched by Blizzard. Also the names would have needed to be renamed only because someone already had the name when the transfer happened.
Now, as for fixing the issue - there are no GMs here on this forum. Only through tickets can your issue be resolved. While you may see Blues around here, they are SFAs, they have nothing to do with tickets and all of that. The unfortunate truth is that GMs are really backlogged in tickets, so that only makes it that much harder to get your issue fixed.
With it being over three weeks now, I believe you’re outside of the window that the self-service refund will work. It is just a matter of going through the tickets. I’m not sure what path you used to submit your ticket, but I would file one under purchase failure if that isn’t how you did your currently active one. Reference your other ticket #, but like Wolfess said, keep it direct and to the point. Too much story and rambling muddies the ticket and invites misunderstanding.
I do wish you well in getting this situated.