First off, I would like to say Hello to everyone I'm a long time reader of MMO-Champion. This, I think, is my first post on here though I may be wrong. Let me first give you some background on me before I get into my strange issues with my World of Warcraft account. I program for a living making iPhone and Android applications. I know how to keep my computers and networks secure. I used a MacBook Pro to play World of Warcraft. (I say used because I haven't played in 3-4 months.) I keep my computer and application on my Mac up-to-date, I have my wireless secure using WPA2, and all my passwords are 10-26 characters long randomly generated with upper/lower case characters, numbers, and symbols. I also do not share my account and I'm the only one that knows the information for my account. I also have been playing WoW since vanilla and this is the first time my account has ever been hacked and I think that says something about my security.

Now that you know a bit about me, this is my story. Last night my iPhone went off because I received a email from blizzard saying my account was banned for Terms of Use Violation -- Exploitative Activity: Abuse of the Economy. I thought this was peculiar seeing as I haven't played World of Warcraft for 3-4 months. I went and checked my characters on armory to find that all my armor was still on my character, which equaled up to around 200g and my main character still had gold on it. If these were gold sellers it seemed like they were very bad at what they were doing funny enough.

So I called Blizzard and waited through 20 minutes of aggravating poor quality music until I finally got ahold of someone. I explained the situation and he agreed that it looked like someone was logging on to my account in the past couple of days from a different IP Address. He then asked me to check and make sure my computer doesn't have any kind of viruses or malware. I explained to the individual on the phone that I program for a living and I make sure my computer is secure. Not to mention I use a Mac with Google Chrome, so the probability that one of these chinese gold farmers making a key logger that would work on Mac alone is very unlikely, but to also be able to get around Google Chrome's sandbox is plain flat impossible. The person on the phone then stated that my email account may have been compromised, however this is very unlikely as I said above I use very strong and secure passwords for these things. There was also the fact that my password to my Battle.net account was not changed and I was still able to login. So being happy that Blizzard was at least going to do an investigation and un-ban my account I just gave in and let the person on the phone think he was right. In hindsight I probably shouldn't have done this.

As I got off the phone he sent me some anti-virus applications for Mac. I started to run one to do a full scan of my Mac to just amuse the tech support. While that was scanning knowing myself the computer was clean I went to go log into my Battle.net account to change my password. My password wasn't working now. I remember thinking to myself "Well isn't this just coincidental, I get off the phone with Blizzard they pull up my account and then bam the so call "hacker" has changed my password". So I go to recover my password having it send a email to my Gmail address and allowing me to reset it. It is at this point when I notice whenever the password is changed to your Battle.net account they send you an email telling you about it. I have my iPhone setup so that my Gmail pushes emails instantly to my phone using Google Sync. (It's a really cool service just search "Google Sync iPhone" on Google.) So I knew that I was never sent an email from Blizzard from when the "hacker" changed my password, regardless of the fact that my gmail may have been compromised. This leads me to believe that somehow someone internally at Blizzard must have changed my Battle.net password for how else did their system not notify me of this change?

After that whole fiasco I went to bed letting my computer continue being scanned for viruses. Surprise surprise when I got up in the morning my Mac was clean, who would have guessed. I then went to check my email to see if there was any news about my account. Indeed there was, I received 5 emails from the World of Warcraft Game Master(s) saying that they restored 5 of my alts. However, my main character according to Armory has been removed from my guild and had given Guild Leadership to some random nobody Level 1 character. To top it all off my account was and is still banned. I then called up one of my parents to see if my main was now the guild leader to see if maybe Armory was being slow to update, just to find out that they have done nothing in regards to this issue. My mother also notices that one of my alts was logged in 7 hours ago. (I have a screen grab of this however I can't post due to my MMO-Champion account being so new. D=) Now my account was banned at 10:08 PM the following day and she logged on to check at 8:00 AM the next day making 7 hours ago being around 1:00 AM. So how is it that someone was on my account while it was banned unless it was internally.

I am still awaiting a response from Blizzard on these last few developments. Now I'm not accusing Blizzard of doing any kind of foul play, but it can't be left out of reason for the facts are pointing towards this being something internally. Whether it be some poor way of Blizzard trying to pull old players back in to a game that has lost around a million players in the last 6 months or if it's a Blizzard employee who is being paid under the table by chinese gold sellers, I really just don't know. I will update this thread if I get any further information.

So my question to everyone is has anyone else had any peculiar situation with their WoW account like what I'm experiencing right now?