Hello,
My son’s account was banned today for Third Party Applications. We have appealed and the answer back is that it will be upheld.
He has been playing wow for all of 6 hours, went from 0 - 20, bought a 60-day game card with his own money, and then leveled up to 23 where he got banned. I setup his game, I setup his addons, he and I were running dungeons today. There was no Third Party Application running during this time and no application was used by him to cheat or otherwise interact with WoW.
What options do we have here? A teenager is out of real money because someone in a room has decided he is cheating when he wasn’t.
I am also paranoid now that his computer is infected with something. Can blizzard please at least give me the name of the application so I can scrub his computer to remove it.
THey wont tell u what program is running botom line is apeal till they tell u no further apeals will be heard and if it comes to that point will have to take the ban.
5 Likes
Appealing via a ticket is the only option.
Then you need to search it for malicious software or any automation software that your son may have installed at some point.
No, unfortunately, they cannot.
8 Likes
Does he play any other games and use any external applications for those games? I ask because programs that may be valid for other games, that allow automation of any kind, can be picked up by Warden and cause it to trigger a report even if it isn’t being used for WoW.
10 Likes
He plays all kinds of other games. He also plays Competitive Overwatch and has no issue with that game.
How is it possible for Blizzard to arbitrarily make this call? I was playing with him the entire time, there were no third-party applications in use.
It’s not arbitrary. Blizzard has software that looks for third party software. It is also extremely unlikely that it was due to the actions at the exact time the account was actioned. These sorts of reports tend to take time.
12 Likes
There is also a really weird series of events that happened.
2:05 he receives email that his account is banned.
2:06 he received email saying that his account is being logged in to by Blizzard and they are removing his authenticator.
2:11 he received email saying his authenticator has been reinstated and is account needs a password reset.
Those are all things that would need to be investigated via a ticket. The forums are too public and are primarily for players like myself, to help other players.
Appeals are not taken via the forums.
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His account was 6 hours old. So it definitely happened while I was playing with him.
Is it possible that your son fell for a phishing attempt?
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Nope. I too received the email from Blizzard about the ban, it’s legit. I did NOT receive the other emails, but I got the ban email on my main email address.
Like nothing is adding up here.
I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned yet, but you can appeal again. You can actually keep appealing until they warn you no more will be accepted. When ban waves go out (which may be piggy-backing off of the large bot ban wave that was announced earlier), it will send out an automated “this decision is being upheld” response with the first appeal. Also, appeals really aren’t you guys pleading your case, but it is a fresh pair of eyes overlooking all of the data that led up to the suspension or ban.
4 Likes
OK, I guess I am confused. How do I get to a real person to discuss this with them? There are too many oddities going on.
That’s actually a little odd. When there’s an account action, I believe only the registered battle.net email receives an email. Perhaps, and I don’t know if this is the case, but if you have parental controls setup, then maybe it sends it to that email too…but I actually don’t know if that’s ever been brought up.
Nonetheless, a ticket is still your only option for an appeal of the account action.
Edit to add:
Tickets are answered by real people. They may use templates, but they’re still people.
Also, an appeal is not for a discussion. The appeal is to have a new set of eyes on the data to see if a mistake was made. There’s no discussion when it comes to account actions. It’s pure data.
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I do not have parental controls setup.
Yes, everything about this ban is odd…including the fact that I got an email about it.
They will not discuss it with you, the appeal is only to review what they found to see if any mistakes might have been overlooked.
2 Likes
Is this a secondary WoW account under the same battle.net account as you are currently using then? Otherwise, I don’t see how they would have any way of even knowing that your son’s account is linked to you in any way at all.
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No, this is a WoW account on HIS Battle.net account. He logs in to it with his own username/password and the authenticator is on his phone.
I’m not too sure what else to tell you to be honest. If it’s a completely separate battle.net email address, then there’s literally no way for Blizzard to have known to e-mail you too.
This sounds more like either an account compromise, or something else going on.
Here’s hoping you can sort it out via a ticket. In the meantime, I’d highly recommend that you run searches for malicious software on your system and your son’s computer too.
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This does sound like an account compromise,
If blizzard suspects an account has been hacked, they shut it down first to prevent additional damage and sort it out later.
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