Account locked for "inccorrect location"?

[gavion]

Good evening all!

Tonight I am running a Call of Duty Black Ops tournament in a movie theater. (Literally, 4 theaters with BLack Ops on the Big screen, rotating out players). While in a lull, i decided to log into Warcraft. I have a mobile authenticator, and am in the US.

It gave me a "Your account is showing suspicious activity, please check your email on how to unlock your account".

So i waited a few minutes, got the email... it said my account was locked and that I was hacked.

1 I AM NOT HACKED. you naysayers may say what you want, my account is not compromised. I asked some guildies, they show i haven't been online, no weird activity, none of my characters are naked, etc.

2) I have a mobile authenticator, and it got to the point where I had to enter it.

3) The only difference is the location I am logging in from.

Any insight?

And again, I was not hacked.

NOTE: I am not posting this on the official forums because... i can''t. :/ i'm locked from those too.

[Sills]

I had the same thing happen to me this evening. I came home to visit my family from my apartment near my university. When I tried to log in using the home internet (it had been about a month since I was here last) I had the same lockout issue.

No big issue...they sent an automated confirmation email, I confirmed and had to change my password. Its annoying yeah, but i like how vigilant they are with account security. If I get locked out when I log in from a different address It will be tougher for someone to get into my account from the other side of the country.

[Petal]

Blizzard afaik mointors the location of the IP addresses we use when we log into their servers...

If say one moment you are logging in from say Phoenix, Arizona and then 5 mins later from Hong Kong... that would be suspicious.

Still I would think it would take more than a single suspicious incident to lock an account.

That's the best I've got. : | Goodluck with getting things sorted out.

[Rivin]

Just do what it says and reset your password. If you were hacked, you'd be thankful this service was in place.

[Splatter]

I had the same thing happen to me this evening. I came home to visit my family from my apartment near my university. When I tried to log in using the home internet (it had been about a month since I was here last) I had the same lockout issue.

No big issue...they sent an automated confirmation email, I confirmed and had to change my password. Its annoying yeah, but i like how vigilant they are with account security. If I get locked out when I log in from a different address It will be tougher for someone to get into my account from the other side of the country.

Had quite a few guildies get this when they were using wow tunnels and switched tunnels, different address to be routed thru flags it up. Nothing to worry about just a security feature kinda

[Oneirophobia]

Thats really sketchy, even if it is legit, that they're locking your accounts due to location and then having you resolve it via email.
Theres gunna be sooo many people getting nailed by fake ones. x_x

This is probably going to happen in a few weeks when I go home for Christmas. Sigh.

Oh, also, when in doubt, call blizzard. Don't rely on email.

[Kudos]

I use a tunneling service to reduce my in-game latency (Since I'm in Australia, and it drops my in game lat from 450 - 220). I got my account locked a few months back because Blizzard saw a discrepancy between my IP address and the tunneling services' IP address.

All it took was a reset of my password, and I was good to go again, and the tunneling service has since provided an option to log into the game using my own IP address.

[Youarefired]

Maybe they want you to play more Black Ops! :-)

Really though, that is very odd. If you were not online, then maybe it was something you had done previously. Or maybe you got reported by someone.

[Rivin]

Thats really sketchy, even if it is legit, that they're locking your accounts due to location and then having you resolve it via email.
Theres gunna be sooo many people getting nailed by fake ones. x_x

This is probably going to happen in a few weeks when I go home for Christmas. Sigh.

Oh, also, when in doubt, call blizzard. Don't rely on email.

It only takes a minute or two to fix it though. Battle.net > Forgot Password > Reset Password.

[Bronze]

It happens to me all the time. I travel a lot in my work and log on from a different country every week. Of course it's a bit of a pain but it is a fair security measure since commercial hacking is 99.9% outside your own country. Now, doing it when you switch city in the same country may be a bit of an overkill...

The email you get contains a link for quick and easy password change.

[ComputerNerd]

While I understand the need for the mechanism on unprotected accounts, I am questioning if it is strictly necessary on those with an authenticator.
I think for those that travel a lot, having an option to avoid that system on an authenticator protected account would not be a bad idea.

[Sills]

I should probably add that in my case, I didnt travel across country to get home. I actually only drove about 2 hrs east of where I love for school which was enough to lock me out. its that sensitive apparently.

[Samoria]

This actually JUST happened to me tonight. I decided to log onto WoW while at my girlfriends house since she is working on Christmas presents and such. But for me i forgot my security question answer so now my account is locked until i can talk to them tomorrow. But at least we can say its working, lol.

[ungar]

http://us.blizzard.com/support/artic...rticleId=21133

fill out the form http://us.blizzard.com/support/artic...orm&rhtml=true

and I think there's another form to report account compromise, but you'll have to look around for it on the official warcraft.com website

basically you're filling out the form with details about your account being hacked, and it gets emailed to blizzard support when you hit submit. then they'll freeze your account and email you if they find it was compromized. I'm not familiar with the message you got when you logged in that said you were hacked, but it may mean that your computer is compromised, so probably want to scan for trojans, keyloggers, and any other recommended cleanup and computer restoration processes....

you may not think you're hacked, but regardless of what your guildmates say, I don't think blizzard sends messages when you log in saying "your account shows suspicious behavior" this is what hackers do to try to bait you to entering information so they can retrieve it... sometimes they say "your account was compromized, please verify password" etc.... anyways, blizzard communicates via email and doesn't say "your account shows suspicious behavior" because they wouldn't want to warn a hacker that they're caught...instead they just ban the account, and email to the email address associated with the account regarding the reason for the ban.

TL;DR you don't know what the hacker is doing, they're full of deception, but blizzard is predictable, and you know there's certain things they don't do. it sounds to me like the warning message you got wasn't from blizzard

[Sills]

Since everything I saw (all messages) were either in game on the log in screen or from blizzard.com or battle.net emails Im satisfied that theres not a hacker component in them.

Ive already scanned and theres no issues. I think it was just an IP issue. I dont know why if thats for sure why it was locked but its not because of my comp.

[Improvedlol]

If you use a proxie server like Smoothpingelite or wowtunnels, you cant get locked as well.
It's really sad because for me it was dropping my ping to 50 or so. Without it I'm at 140 sad panda indeed

[Rivin]

you may not think you're hacked, but regardless of what your guildmates say, I don't think blizzard sends messages when you log in saying "your account shows suspicious behavior" this is what hackers do to try to bait you to entering information so they can retrieve it... sometimes they say "your account was compromized, please verify password" etc.... anyways, blizzard communicates via email and doesn't say "your account shows suspicious behavior" because they wouldn't want to warn a hacker that they're caught...instead they just ban the account, and email to the email address associated with the account regarding the reason for the ban.

TL;DR you don't know what the hacker is doing, they're full of deception, but blizzard is predictable, and you know there's certain things they don't do. it sounds to me like the warning message you got wasn't from blizzard

That's actually not true. If you try to login after your account is locked you do get a message saying that the account was locked for suspicious behavior, as well as the notification email. I just saw it recently myself.

[Deleted]

It happened to me a few months ago when I changed my living location. But as someone said above about people possibly falling for scams this way. I don't think it's entirely possible. When I had my account locked, I was provided a link on the log in screen for wow itself that directed me to battle.net. All I did was double check the e-mail link then followed that and the simple three stage process to reset password.

And to ComputerNerd; It's a good feature for authenticated accounts as well, considering a couple of people I know who own authenticators have had their accounts hacked even with it. No idea how it happened, but it did. It's a fair safety measure that generally helps everyone.

Just an extra thing to the OP. After receiving that e-mail from Blizz telling me to redo my password, I had a few hundred scam e-mails, just keep your eyes open for them after.

[wolfphyre87]

ive had my account locked for using my wifes laptop instead of my own while in our own house lol, its a nice feature but it is annoying sometimes.

[Intoeternity]

as many people have said already, blizzard implemented new security.

you login from ip1 all the time, so they mark that as your account ip
you login from your friends house (ip2) and they notice that ip2 does not equal ip1, so they lock your account (for your security), and have you unlock it.