I’m posting here because I don’t know what else to do. I was suspended for 2 weeks for having “acquired gold through illicit means” even though I have hard evidence to the contrary but I can’t get Blizzard to get a human to look at the evidence. I need help or advice for how to get through to them.
This is my first suspension ever even though I’ve been playing WoW for years. I have concluded this must be from my action trading gold between versions of the game (Cataclysm and Era, specifically). This has been allowed for many months and I personally know tons of people who have traded the same way I have been. Apparently others who have been doing this trade for months if not years with WOTLK / TBC were also recently hit with a two week suspension around the same time.
So I appealed. In my appeal I included screenshots of the conversation between the guy I traded with and myself and made sure to include timestamps so they could cross reference the names of the characters and times they were traded with my conversation to know this was just a trade between versions. On top of that the next and only purchase on Cataclysm was for a WoW token a few days later (I waited for the price of the token to dip a bit) and then I immediately used it for 30 days of game time. I have been doing this exact trade with the same 2 people for months now to afford my subscription.
However, my appeal got an automated denial within 24 hours and so I added more evidence and a little more context to the appeal with 2 further posts. The next response I received was a template response from GM Klingoura saying that my account is now PERMANENTLY banned for breaking TOS.
I’m writing this post not to prove that I am innocent, the appeal and timestamps of the trades has all the evidence for that, I’m writing this to hopefully get a human to look at the ticket and get my main account I made so many years ago unbanned so I can now pay for the subscription. I definitely will not be trading between versions anymore as it’s just not worth the risk.
I am feeling very defeated. If someone has any advice or ideas to get my account back i’m open to almost anything. Thank you guys for reading 
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This is precisely what happened, its “legal” but unsupported, blizzard won’t ban it for some reason when they absolutely should, considering that you can legally purchase gold through tokens on other versions of the game, not to mention that you have no way to verify if the person you are legally trading with illegally gathered the gold. They ninja updated the ToS about 6 months ago after they banned an absolute ton of people on SoD for the same thing.
Its extremely customer unfriendly, basically they cannot tell if you bought gold or not, they’ll just shoot you with the same bullet they’d use for an actual gold buyer, its a failure of both their own systems and their own janky rules being passed down to the customer and told its their fault.
Don’t expect sympathy on these forums though, there are an army of people who will support a company banning people for not knowingly breaking any rules because they have some weird vigilantism against people who they believe are “doing wrong” by transferring gold between games legally
Firstly, it’s quite possible the gold the other person gave you was RMT, or any number of variations, who knows.
A human definitely looked into your situation, don’t assume it was all bots. If you are innocent I am sorry it happened to you.
As the other posted, TOS were updated, though I forget what the exact wording was
You got bamboozled friend.
Even if the trader you conversed with promised you it was legit gold, farmed or token, they lied.
You just got caught with the marked bills.
Have you considered posting in the Customer Support forums?
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You deserve a ban then. WoW tokens exist in Cata. They don’t in Era. You’re therefore facilitating a means of RMT in Era. If that’s not a reason to ban you it should be.
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No, what he’s done is not illegal. It’s unsupported - meaning tht if the other part cheats you Blizz won’t help you a bit. It is strange to me why they should suddenly ban people doing this.
Customer support Forum would be the place to post - or maybe X.
You should be banned, period. If Blizzard wanted a token there, they would have put it in. You are gaining advantage over others by cheating.
I wish they would do the same thing to all people who buy raid runs in retail.
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So you got banned not because what you did was “BAD” but because you did not pay Blizzard for the gold. Basically what you did was cut them out of the loop and they want to make sure when you get gold in the future you BUY it from blizzard store.
Capiche?
Except that the OP doesn’t know and cannot prove the source of the gold and only has proof of the trade between characters. Well, OP also has documented side convos where the trader lied to them about the legitimacy of the trade and that the gold was not illegally obtained.
This is exactly what Blizzard has warned players about time and time again.
Transactions of this nature are unsupported because the company isn’t issuing Get Out of Jail Free cards. Even though one cannot verify the source you are still accepting of the risk that you become an accessory to theft ie account theft that yielded this stolen gold received. Is it fair that someone had their account stolen and/or payment data hijacked and another player “profited”?
It probably stings a lot to have an account permanently banned.
Thank you, OP, for posting this cautionary tale. It may be too late for your account but perhaps will be a wake up call to others.
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That is beyond anyones ability to know. Are you saying if someone pays me 1k to drop rend I need to have vetted the gold? That is not a reasonable standard.
Also why would someone buy era gold with real money and trade it for cata gold. Which they could get burnt on. When they could just buy Cata gold via token. It makes much more sense in reverse.
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This seems reasonable to me. I feel like Blizz should tell him this is the reason though.
I’ll try to keep this brief because it does no good to speculate what may have happened.
I mentioned the “proof” that the OP said was provided. He’s not going to have any relevant data that Blizzard hasn’t already reviewed since the OP has no way to see the source of the gold he received. He also stated
so it is reasonable to think that Blizzard went back and looked into it. If they were following the dirty money and the OP was constantly on the receiving end … it looks sorta bad.
It is not up to us to do the vetting. It is our responsibility to be familiar with the ToS and use common sense because Blizzard will enforce it at the time of their choosing.
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That’s what every guilty person. You’re guilty as sh!t for something not right and you know it.