Blizzard seems to be the cause of any and all spam email I receive

[Orange Joe]

Did you ever consider the email client you are using? Just today in class, the instructor was mentioning how g-mail is great at blocking spam to almost nothing compared to other clients...like Hotmail.

I use g-mail. I don't get ANY spam, and I use the email on a lot of different sites.

[shokter]

My wow account is connected to an email that I only use for wow. I have never received any email on it from anyone other than Blizzard. Ever.

[yurano]

I've never gotten anything like this on my WoW email account.

Ditto.

In fact, I've only ever gotten official Battle net emails on my WoW email account.

[Deleted]

If you use Gmail, one trick you can use is use youremailaddress+somethingrandom@gmail.com

For example lets say your e-mail address is StayTuned@gmail.com

Now, we add the website here StayTuned+com.mmo-champion@gmail.com tells you this e-mail address is used for MMO Champion.

Another example would be StayTuned+net.battle@gmail.com which tells you the e-mail address is used for Battle.net.

Using this scheme you can easily find out to which address the e-mail is heading to and who's been selling your e-mail address. You can even blacklist certain e-mail address this way. You used to have to use aliases and such for this, but Gmail is very user friendly in this regard even for the average user.

[Kralejeeze]

I have an old AOL email account that I hardly ever use. Every time I log onto it I have loads and loads of spam and phishing from "Blizzard". However, on my GMAIL account that I use for my battle.net I do not receive any spams at all. I also use my gmail for everything I do online now.

It just seems that some emails get the short end of the straw.

[jbombard]

It doesn't mean they are selling email addresses. If you are using a common mail provider, it isn't that hard for a bot to randomly generate a bunch of email addresses send them off and see which ones come back as not existing. A lot of people play WoW/battle .net games. Just because you received a WoW based phishing mail doesn't mean they know you play WoW, it isn't as if sending that email to everyone is costing them money.

[stumpy]

I have yet to receive a single Blizzard (or TOR, or Runescape, or GW2, or any other game that I don't even play)-related email on my battle.net account.

On the other hand, the throwaway account that I use for MMO-Champ and other incubators of festering Internet vileness has been completely inundated with such spam for years.

[StayTuned]

Hey all, it's worth nothing that these messages that have any variation of 'it has come to our attention that you're trying to sell your X account' are not actually from Blizzard Entertainment - and are one of the many prevalent forms of phishing/spam that are reported to us. For more information about phishing mails, we offer our support page which provides details about how to detect such scams. It can be pretty tricky trying to determine when a message is legitimately from us, as often times the spammers will modify the mail in such a way to make it look like it's coming from an address that it really is not. We would appreciate it if you would forward any suspicious emails to our investigative team, at hacks@blizzard.com - otherwise, you are also welcome to contact our customer support directly.

Well well, this was unexpected. I'll gladly forward the scam mails to you. Maybe you guys can actually make some use out of it.

Of all the possible reasons why you're getting spam email, Blizzard having sold your email address to spammers is about the least reasonable conclusion.

When have I ever said that Blizzard is selling my email? Why are people constantly bringing this up, even though I said myself that it's highly unlikely that they would do such a thing. The profit would not be higher than the loss they would suffer through the leaving customers if it would ever surface.

And again, because it seems that nobody is really reading my OP. My GMAIL accounts are all 100% clean. I have never even received one spam mail.
But on more than half of my test accounts that I have connected to my battle.net account, spam was visible within one day. There is no explanation for it.

I am not stirring anything against Blizzard (I wouldn't even dare with all those fanbois around), even though my thread title was poorly worded. But there is something that's either related to my client, the battle.net website or my computer. Or maybe everything is connected to each other, which means that there is something, maybe a cookie (which is unlikely since I clear my cookies every time I delete my browser history...) that tracks the email I type into the battle.net login.

[Beno113]

When have I ever said that Blizzard is selling my email?

How about the part where the title of the thread is called "Blizzard seems to be the cause of any and all spam email I receive"

[StayTuned]

How about the part where the title of the thread is called "Blizzard seems to be the cause of any and all spam email I receive"

Which totally implies that they are selling it. Righhhhht......

---------- Post added 2013-02-01 at 02:04 AM ----------

Okay, I've looked into it a little bit and now it makes even less sense.

Von: Diablo III [pauliuskrucas@yahoo.com]
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 31. Januar 2013 09:58
An: f.svendsen@mail.dk
Betreff: Diablo III Account - login validation

This email was sent from a stolen @yahoo mail. The receiver, however, was supposed to be f.svendsen@mail.dk. Why the fuck did I receive this mail?

[jbombard]

Which totally implies that they are selling it. Righhhhht......

---------- Post added 2013-02-01 at 02:04 AM ----------

Okay, I've looked into it a little bit and now it makes even less sense.



This email was sent from a stolen @yahoo mail. The receiver, however, was supposed to be f.svendsen@mail.dk. Why the fuck did I receive this mail?

It was likely sent by a bot using the stolen yahoo mail account. The name you see in the receiver is probably just for display purposes and is actually one member of a large group of receivers.

With this type of thing there are a number of explanations. Yes it is possible a server got compromised and your email account was stored on that server and that is how they got it. Yes it is possible somebody working at some company that has access to your email sold it. It is also very possible it part of a bulk spam package that got sent out from a compromised account. It could be any of those. There is absolutely no way of hiding an email address from these people with 100% reliability, as sending out exploratory bulk spam from compromised accounts will let them know whether or not an account exists whether or not you even read the mail.

If you have never received spam on an email account,
1) You have likely picked a hard to guess name
2) You have not used it on the internet for *anything* other than a logon to a game
3) Due to 1 a random address generating spam tool hasn't bumped up against your address yet

[Deleted]

4) You use an insanely good spam blocker.

[Orange Joe]

Which totally implies that they are selling it. Righhhhht......

---------- Post added 2013-02-01 at 02:04 AM ----------

Okay, I've looked into it a little bit and now it makes even less sense.



This email was sent from a stolen @yahoo mail. The receiver, however, was supposed to be f.svendsen@mail.dk. Why the fuck did I receive this mail?

I like how you claim blizzard was hacked and don't show anything to back that claim up.

[Tziva]

When have I ever said that Blizzard is selling my email? Why are people constantly bringing this up, even though I said myself that it's highly unlikely that they would do such a thing. The profit would not be higher than the loss they would suffer through the leaving customers if it would ever surface.

Well, you implied that they were the reason spammers were getting your email address and I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that you thought they were selling it rather than giving it away, since that makes even less sense.

[Herecius]

Your PC being clean has absolutely nothing to do with getting these spam emails. Spam emails are because your email is on some compromised database, somewhere, and finds itself on a list of emails for spammers. The only way to actually have a completely clean account is to have a secure email account that is used for WoW, and WoW only, and will never appear anywhere else on the Internet.

[Hakto]

I want to point out that email address are not as 'private' as you may think.

Forums, chat boards, social media sites all have different settings for how email addresses are stored or handled.

Also many email addresses are a matter of public record, let's use university email addresses as an example, they are often searchable by any one registered at that university, or through any online groups etc you may register for.

[Vober]

I get these emails all the time on my alt email account that I use, not even the main one I use with my WoW account.. I just delete them when I get them.

[Bryntrollian]

I like how you claim blizzard was hacked and don't show anything to back that claim up.

Not trying to start any trouble but it is a fact that blizzard was hacked a little while ago...

[Deleted]

I get this all the time aswell, wouldnt know if i been banned until i tried to log on WoW cause of all the spammails -_-

[lordjust]

I seriously have no other explanation. It's also weird that only 4 out of 6 emails have been spammed. One would assume that all of them should be spammed. On the other hand, some people do have the same spam emails like me, others don't.

It's just weird.... everything started with battle.net and everything can be traced back to battle.net, yet it isn't supposed to be the problem? Kinda hard to believe.

Thing is that a lot of email providers like web.de, gmx.de, @facebook and so on write in their EULA that they are allowed to use your personal information for research purposes meaning they are allowed to look what emails you get and sell your email address to other companies. They are even allowed to sell email addresses from persons you write or get emails from.

So by linking your battle.net account to one of the emails the provider sees that you get emails from Blizzard and sells your address to another company. Even when you have a safe address like one from the university the provider from someone you wrote an email has this address and when that person plays MMOs his provider will probably also sell your address to another company.

You can't be safe from spam mails because there are so many providers out there that will sell every piece of information they legally can. There are some providers like gmail that are very good in filtering and blacklisting spam mails.

Also using cookies can be a factor for getting spam mails as some websites (like google or any other that uses personalized advertising) are allowed to check cookies and it can be that in these cookies your email address is stored and with information from other cookies companies can create a profile for your email address and are allowed to sell these informations.

I don't think that Blizzard sells your personal information because they state in their EULA that they won't sell your information to anyone and if they did, they'd get a lot of trouble.