Silly Chinese Hackers!

I quit playing WoW a little over ten months ago. Recently, I went on a short vacation and while away from home, I checked my Gmail. The PC I used was apparently infected with a key logger, because that very day some Chinese hackers took control of my World of Warcraft account.

Now, ordinarily, I would never have noticed. In this particular case, however, I was visiting with some friends who I used to play WoW with. One of them is still a very active player, and we started talking about the latest events and how the gave is evolving. I started getting curious about the game and thought I might play casually when I get some free time, just to stay in touch with my friends.

When I tried to log in to my account in order to download the game client, however, I was unable to do so. I assumed it was a problem from where previously I was playing in Asia and my account had been merged to Battlenet.Asia. Little did I know...

So I called up Blizzard tech support right before they closed, and explained my situation, and they reset my password for me and transferred the account from the Asian Battlenet to the US version. At that point, the Chinese hackers who were already well into looting my account and noticed the password change. They took it one step further by locking me out of my Gmail account!

This happened while I slept, and when I woke up the next morning I noticed immediately that something was wrong because my Gmail notifier was logged out and couldn't log back in using my old password. Further investigation revealed the same problem no matter how I tried to access Gmail.

Having never encountered anything like this before, I decided the only possible explanation was that my account was compromised. I immediately filled out the Gmail account recovery web-form, and within thirty minutes they had verified the problem and restored full control back to me.

I then waited for about 45 minutes (until Blizzard's call center was open again,) and called them to restore my account. Again, this happened pretty much as soon as I told them what was up, and the account was restored over to me.

Since I had downloaded and installed the game client while I was sleeping, I was instantly able to log in and verify that I had control of my account. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the Chinese hackers had reactivated my account, using their own credit card! Free month of game-play in exchange for my brief troubles? Why thank you Xi Wang!

Where did I come up with that random Chinese name, you ask? Well, he changed all my Gmail account information: the language to Mandarin, the time zone / location to Beijing, and the name to Xi Wang.

Good 'ol Wang tried to reset the password once after I got the account back, but realized all bases were covered and he no longer had any chance at regaining access.

By early afternoon, the fine GMs at Blizzard had researched and restored my account to pre-hack status. And so I learned the lesson that one can no longer play WoW unless one is using a Blizzard authenticator.