Wondering if anyone has ever encountered this before. Minding your own and all of a sudden you have a ban on your WoW account. If so, what are the odds/time frames people have encountered getting their account restored.
backstory to question... if you care to read it. Last night around 3:30am EST i log out after playing a low level paladin on a server i decided to reroll on(switching from PVP to PVE realms). I never chatted with anyone, guild, group, trade, anything. I might have messaged my friend over realid, dont recall when i did that last. I go to log in after a few hours sleep and getting my kids off to school, and it tells me the account is locked out... see this url... so on. So i check out my account, and come to find its permanently banned. i log on to the dedicated email used only for WoW/Battle.net, and never once entered on other sites, or given to anyone or anything other then a legit blizzard owned site/game. I see the email there recieved perhaps an hour earlier saying the account is closed due to identified activity involving items/gold for real world currency. Of course my imediate reaction is ...what the hell... since i started playing back in BC, never once have i done such a thing, never bought gold, or items, game time... nothing. Only time ive used cash for in game items was off the blizzard store for things like pets/mounts on occasion.
Popped a ticket off to blizzard(likely be over 24 hours before i get a reply, been like 17 so far), asking what exacly i did, and if i was hacked. Gave my last logged in time and everything else i could think of to see if they could ID that i was hacked or not. I then looked at my armory pages for some of my level 90 characters, none of which were missing any gear, or had anything that looked odd or similar to when one gets hacked(like how gear usually gets vendored to max gold profits off it). The last activity was consistant with when i was on last for each character, some were listed as 'yesterday' for the most part, since most i had not played after midnight PDT, just a single level 90 i moved to a new realm a few days ago, and the paladin i was leveling on that same realm.
My email shows no activity other then my own(gmail, shows recent activity/ips). Of course have the auth key for my battle.net account, that sits on my desk as it has for a few years now. No one else uses this computer in the house. Unless my 6 year old daughter suddenly learned my wow password, and how to type out and conduct a transaction online... but yeah, no one uses my computer. Of course changed all my passwords just in case. Nothing anywhere, other then suddenly being banned, showed signs of a hack. Oh and i doubt there are any virus at play unless they have them now for linux looking for your wow login info, and auth key info.
So kinda has me a little confused as to how i would get banned if i was not in fact hacked. I dont talk to much of anyone in game lately. Become somewhat of a recluse. I log in, level something for a while, maybe toss some low level items on the AH, and thats about it. I dont do any trades of any kind out side of the AH. I dont use trade chat to buy or sell goods/services, and generally dont even look at trade chat having it filtered to another chat window. Only time i ever do talk is with one of my friends on RealID, and generally it doesnt even have much to do about WoW, and more to do about other stuff going on in life.
Only things i could think of that could have caused this...
- Blizzard just pulled the trigger for no good reason, or in mistake on my account
- The fact i use a paid VPN service connecting to the internet(privateinternetaccess), so perhaps guilt by association using the same IP as some baddie.
- account was in fact hacked, and perhaps banned before the hacker had a chance to liquidate my items, or the armory just has not shown the changes yet.
TLDR, has anyone been banned after just minding their own and playing the game the way its meant and allowed to? if so... what was the eventual outcome, and how long did it take to get there. perhaps reasons for a false positive on the ban as well. (really wish they said more in the email, like you sold this thing or stuff for X dollars on monday and here is the line of text from trade/msg proving it...something other then just a ...you are banned, so long)