Diablo 3 Account Hacked? You Need A Warrant To Find Out How
Warning! This post is very long and details what consumers can expect going through the proper channels for account resolution. The short gist of it is that you cannot find out what happened to your account without a federal warrant. You will be lied to regarding account information; customer support is now a contradictory PR haven providing nothing more than rollbacks and misinformation. Continue reading at your own discretion.
By now you may have heard about all the compromised account claims for Diablo III. It's been a widespread issue. According to Blizzard a small percentage of Diablo III accounts have been compromised. According to gold farmers, about 10,000 accounts have been infiltrated the traditional method and countless others have been infiltrated from non-traditional methods. Well, if you fit into the latter category, you won't be able to find out how those non-traditional methods were used to infiltrate your account without a federal warrant.
According to Blizzard customer service representative Torrencius, when pressured about how an account was compromised, he issues the following stonewalling response...
I'm sure many of you are curious what Custodian of Records has to say about the matter, because by all means if your account has been breached I'd like to think that anyone with an ounce of self-respect would want to prevent the occurrence from happening again. And as the old saying goes, if you know not to kick a horse in the gonads, then the horse won't kick you in the face.
However, with Blizzard that doesn't seem to be the case. Players whose accounts have been compromised since Diablo III went live back in mid-May have been left completely in the dark about their accounts being infiltrated, including writers from Ars Technica, Eurogamer and Examiner. Instead, Blizzard has been doling out PR-safe responses displacing the blame on consumers: It must have been a keylogger. It was "traditional". You must have been hitting up some pr0n on 4Chan. You were fondling your hard drive wrong. You visited a fansite and got your PC impregnated with malware. You weren't using an authenticator.
Everything you can think of to blame consumers is pretty much what everyone has been fed. And yes, some accounts have been infiltrated via traditional means, but this doesn't discount that more information should be shed on the issue.
Furthering this kind of condescending behavior, you're about to read a first-hand result of what it's like dealing with the Custodian of Records (who, might I add, sounds like someone out of the Diablo lore). This guy, just as a warning, is a prick. Read what Game Master Strybur, Custodian of Records says to a consumer trying to inquire about how his account was infiltrated...
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After that cheerful exchange, Mr. Prick goes on to twaddle about a number of things under the PR-safe guise. I'm not going to bother posting all the drivel about how it was the consumer's fault and the appropriate steps to fix security for the end-user. Instead, the purpose of this article is to find out what happens when you try to find out how your account was infiltrated. And Mr. Prick decides to completely evade HOW the account was intilrated, saying...
Ahahaha...oh yeah, teh interwebz R bad.
Sherlock here lists all the ways the consumer could have been infiltrated from doing menial tasks on the PC but completely foregoes the questioning of HOW the account was infiltrated and used in Diablo III for nefarious purposes.
Seriously, by all means people, if someone logs in from Incheon, South Korea directly after someone logged out from Indianapolis, Minnesota, it should have set off red flags all over the freaking place. Any idiot looking at the logs should at least have been able to verify this right? If it were a compromised case of "traditional means"....right?!
Anyways, the Custodian of Douchery is asked a few more questions...pretty much all the questions we asked before in every other article regarding account infiltration of Diablo III. When approached with the possibility that it could have been a breach or glitch, Strybur states...
Oh okay, well that clears it up. We can assume anyone who has had their account compromised was obviously infiltrated by some nefarious individual. You just won't ever be able to find out how unless you've got some legal heavyweights backing you. In other words, Blizzard doesn't have to tell you Jack-spit about how all your characters lost their stuff or ended up being deleted in some cases.
The rest of the questions follow through as indicated...
That last part is straight-up insulting. This idiot doesn't seem to understand that people are already being compromised. This idiot also contradicts Game Master Cerville who mentions that they did check the account for malicious entry but couldn't find it, proving that this kind of information is not as confidential or out of reach as they indicate.
You know what's even more embarrassing? One of the mule accounts owned by a gold farmer was "hacked"...a mule account, which was used to farm gold. It was infiltrated. If you can stop yourself from laughing at the irony, this was one of the reasons why the other Chinese gold farmer asked Blizzard to update the Warden security protocol because even some gold farmer accounts are at risk and they want to weed out the competition. Awesome, right?
Diablo III is shaping up to be like the hacking playground equivalent to that prison-dimension in the Jet Li movie 'The One', attracting countless criminals from all over the world.
Anyways, with the RMAH opening it's imperative to practice safe playing habits. And sorry for this article being so long but I just feel that gamers need to be aware that Blizzard is not on your side, and they don't care about you they care about your money. Heck, one Game Master going by the handle of Thantelus actually suggested a hack victim go to the forums to seek help from players. Don't believe me? Check out his response below and gasp at the ignorance...
Take note that this above fool just copy and pasted a response from a World of Warcraft case and plastered it into the e-mail response for a Diablo III case. Awesome job, Blizzard. The situation was later rectified by Game Master Xyrnath, who tried to assuage the customer by saying...
I'm sure a lot of White Knights will jump to the defense of Blizzard "There are millions of people out there with problems, customer support must be overwhelmed!" True that, but Blizzard was the one who decided to make the game always-on and decided to introduce the RMAH. If they didn't foresee this kind of madness then they were unquestionably blinded by greed.
This isn't a Blizzard bashing post, it's a eye-opener post. This is a warning to any and every future victim of RMAH scams, hacking, account misappropriation and infiltration. Hackers will not subside; dupers will not quit; exploiters will not rest. You are now responsible for your own account and real-life financial safety playing Diablo III because as shown above, the Blizzard support staff is in disarray and running on PR fumes. Their main goal now is to protect the company's resources at all costs.
Staff Writer at CinemaBlend.
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