so i signed up for a forum account at elitist jerks

[baconwing]

and its the only thing i have signed up for using the same email account as i signed up for my original wow account all those many years ago. its the only website i have signed up that email account for in several months and shortly after i began recieving emails from "noreply@blizzard.com" and "WoWAccountAdmin@blizzard.com" informing me of all sorts of different things ranging from "you have recently changed your password, please follow this link and verify your account name and password" to "you are suspected of having sold your account and need to report to this website so we can confirm you are not in violation of the TOS and please fill in all your information, including account name and password". the thing is, my account pw wasnt changed like they tried to tell me it had been, unless someone maliciously changed it to...... the exact same thing as it was before. and the 3 hour ban i was supposed to recieve never happened either, unless i suppose it happened while i was sleeping, but i was on my account pretty solid for a whole weekend when i got the email.

these are obviously bogus emails trying to set me up for a hack, but it just seems strange that it all followed me signing up for elitist jerks website.

now i dont use that email to sign up for very many things, i used it to sign up for this website a while back, but not many other things, and literally nothing recent. I guess im just wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience, and what the circumstances were surrounding recieving bogus emails.

[wow4lyfe05]

Right here man the same thing happened to me right after i signed up but i am glad to say i dont visit that site much anymore because of that certain incident.

[thehoodie]

Elitist Jerks is totally a site for chinese gold farmers.

Yup.

[Dereandor]

If i'm not mistaken your email is shown on some profile of sorts if you don't turn that off, could it be that they got it from there? i know i would look for emails on profiles on those kind of pages if i were a scammer maybe that can be helpful, if not, i don't know

[black-]

same happened to me. non stop fishing mails...
i think alot of hacks are coming from there. maybe admins grab your pass and mail and try to login into your BNET account. a lot of people use same mails / passes for everything !

changing wow logins to email adresses was just blizzards way to make you buy the authenticator thingy. this was the cause for the new hacker wave.

[Lark]

Elitist Jerks is totally a site for chinese gold farmers.

Yup.

For serious.

And by that I mean, if there's a security flaw, you should bring it up with the people in charge of that forum. I knew all of them well and I would say without a doubt that they would take it seriously, if there really is a flaw.

And there is no way any admin there would try to steal your stuff.

[Bluedynamite]

same happened to me. non stop fishing mails...
i think alot of hacks are coming from there. maybe admins grab your pass and mail and try to login into your BNET account. a lot of people use same mails / passes for everything !

changing wow logins to email adresses was just blizzards way to make you buy the authenticator thingy. this was the cause for the new hacker wave.

And yet you signed up on these forums for no other purpose than to express this point of view. Have you met my friend, Incongruity?

[black-]

jep, just for that.

[Norcyz]

I don't have an elitistjerks account and I don't feel like going to verify my theory. However I believe Dereandor is correct.

Many forum softwares will publicly show your user profile if you know where to look. And the majority of them will show your profile to another registered user. If you've not chosen to hide your email in said profile then anyone can see it.

E.g.- Scammer looks at the profiles on elitistjerks (perhaps from his own registered EJ account) and thinks to himself "You know, I'll bet this person plays WoW. I'll send them some scam emails!" Hell it's probably scraped from the site via a script and the emails dumped into a database labeled "Be sure to spam these people!"

So yeah .. it's not the people at EJ stealing your info. Oh, on a related note: Blizzard didn't make us merge our WoW accounts into Bnet to make us buy authenticators.

[SilverLynx]

It's probably because you've got your email visible, if not, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that EJ was the victim of a bruteforce attack like many other boards have been - after all, if they can get a list of emails and passwords they might end up with a full list of wow accounts too.

Since it's only spam, I'd just say they've found your email.

I wouldn't ever bother making an EJ account - I'm good enough to abuse all their information, but there's no point in posting ANYWHERE on that site. They will ban you for asking questions, having fun, making a spelling mistake...yeah...you can read the stickies without having an account and that's more than enough information.

[black-]

well i don't care that much but i suggest to register with trashmails.

just received "password reset sucsess"
Someone 67.225.57.172 Aion has been reset to your game account password. If you not make the change, please contact support https:

i don't play aion anyway and it just smells chinese.

[sulfuric]

Elitist Jerks gets more hits than any other WoW third party website out there. It wouldn't surprise me if there are a few wolves in the hen house if you get my speaking. Just be skeptical and ignore the emails, you can even speak to the webmaster of EJ and have him take action.

[Crona]

Hate to pop your bubble, but i have been a member of the EJ forums for a very long time. And i have never received any of these bogus mails. Also i checked and my e-mail is not hidden. Maybe you visited some other site? or perhaps just a coincidence. Either way if you are 100% certain goldfarmers are abusing the EJ forums i suggest you contact any of the moderators on that board and they will surely take you serious and look into it.

[Exera]

I am certain that if you make a completely fresh email, don't register on any WoW related forums with it, and only use it for non wow related things you'll still get emails trying to steal your account.

Hell I even get emails from sites claiming my Aion account(I dont even have one) is under investigation and I should go to <insert random dodgy site here> and provide my information. Thing is I don't even have an Aion account, never gone to a Aion related site(ever), not added this certain email adress anywhere aion is even mentioned(no not even curse).

So I doubt it's a security issue with EJ for you to get these kinds of mails.

[mafain]

I dont even have an EJ account and I get those emails. My account has been closed for months now but Im still getting the same crap mail your getting regarding myself breeching ToU. I doubt it has anything to do with EJ or MMO-Champ

[Norcyz]

Hate to pop your bubble, but i have been a member of the EJ forums for a very long time. And i have never received any of these bogus mails. Also i checked and my e-mail is not hidden. Maybe you visited some other site? or perhaps just a coincidence. Either way if you are 100% certain goldfarmers are abusing the EJ forums i suggest you contact any of the moderators on that board and they will surely take you serious and look into it.

Well, citing 1 case out of the many users EJ has is indicative of nothing (for either assumption). I was just saying that would be one way to gather some WoW-related email addresses and abuse them.

[Norcyz]

I am certain that if you make a completely fresh email, don't register on any WoW related forums with it, and only use it for non wow related things you'll still get emails trying to steal your account.

Hell I even get emails from sites claiming my Aion account(I dont even have one) is under investigation and I should go to <insert random dodgy site here> and provide my information. Thing is I don't even have an Aion account, never gone to a Aion related site(ever), not added this certain email adress anywhere aion is even mentioned(no not even curse).

So I doubt it's a security issue with EJ for you to get these kinds of mails.

Yeah, likely not an issue with EJ or etc. And while it is possible for email spammers to just guess at email addresses and spam away, hoping to get some hits, it's less likely than some other possibilities, IMO.

For instance, your email is seen as registered to a MMO forum or any online video game one. Or your email is gathered for a video games beta-test and leaked. Perhaps it's seen and then sold to these nasty spammers with a "video gamer" tag next to it to provide context so they can charge more for their list. Perhaps you registered your email with BestBuy and had at one time written a review snippet about a game you bought and liked. Or any number of other possibilities. In the end you have your email address in the hands of a spammer and he's thinking "this email digs video games. let's spam away with something seemingly relevant."

Personally, I have my own mail server and I create a separate email address for every site I sign up for. So if I ever receive spam addressed to an email address I own I'll know how they got it. And I can then go and delete the address itself from my server.

The addresses that I own that I've literally never used anywhere on the internet don't receive any spam. (It's possible, just unlikely, IMO and from my experience.)

[Cite]

They have programs that can go through forums and collect emails and EJ being one of the bigger wow forums where people with pretty solid characters hang out if you want to put it that way. Only makes sense for people collecting emails to then spam with scams to target forums like that and this etc.

[baconwing]

the really wierd thing is that the emails "noreply@blizzard.com" is a legit blizzard email that they have contacted me about legit issues in the past, but i know the email was a scam. how can they make it look like its coming from a legit blizzard email address?