Disappointed

My World of Warcraft account has been hacked and is being used to spam other players. I have had my account suspended twice in 48 hours for spamming when I haven't even been on! Account services have been next to useless apart from the quick suspension of my account which has hopefully stopped too much crap. At this stage apart from being extremely frustrating (and has resulted in me not wanting to play) there does not seem to have been too much damage done apart from the spamming. From what I can tell so far, my characters gold and items are intact. I haven't been able to check the guild bank yet so I will reserve judgment until I do.

I have all my system up to date, my anti virus is up to date and even after changing the email associated with the account and the password it was still compromised a second time. My anti virus showed up nothing. I installed Windows Defender which picked up nothing and then Spybot Search and Destroy which did pick up a tracker - my guess is this is how they were getting access to my changed email and password. This has now been removed. Initially I think it was installed at a website that looked like the Warcraft account login due to a message I received in game that appeared to come from Blizzard. As I accessed this when I was tired, I wasn't as vigilant as I could have been. I will not make that mistake again. Hackers piss me off no end and so does the fact that you almost need an IT degree to play a favourite game safely on line. It also pisses me off that hackers get paid to do what they do - until it becomes financially un-viable for them to do what they do this kind of behaviour will continue and I believe escalate. I don't think we should have to know exactly how everything has to work inside and out to play something casually however it appears that may be a naive point of view and one that may have no place in our spiraling out of control society (that is another rant for another time).

I have tried to contact Blizzard accounts for Warcraft but they are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment and cannot take my call. I wonder why ?

On a positive note relating to my last post, Cleopatra did come home that night and we have had no more escapes to date :-)