alert! anyone else experienced this?

I got an email today telling me that my password had been changed. When I went to the main wow site it said the certificate was suspicious and named *.worldofwarcraft. All my gold is gone as is all the valuable stuff in inventory. they left the soulbound items.

I've called the # for blizzard in the email and only gotten busy signals.

I was able to change my PW but wonder if there is still some hack going on.

Whenever I see emails like that (thankfully never so far *knock on wood*), I would view them with FULL headers to make sure that they are infact from blizzard and not being spoofed to show that way..

Blizzard never asks for your password and thus if your password was changed (not sure if they do actually send an email that your password has changed), it means your system has been compromised..

I'm extremely weary as to what sites I go to.. and of those I get advertised in email.. well, they go straight to spam bin.

talk to a GM in game that happened to a friend and they replaced everything even my friends character was deleted and a Gm fixed it all and even had exact stats and everything. they should help

It could be related to email, but also the infamous key loggers that can be inadvertently downloaded via a variety of websites.

Generally having a good firewall, virus/spyware checking and keeping your web browsing limited to respectable sites should avoid the problem. There are several wow resources around that tell you the best programs to use to make it as difficult as possible for your account to get hacked (although hackers will always find away to bypass etc.).

Saintchuck is right talk to a GM in game. They are generally better at restoring items/gold etc than the telephone customer service.

Yeah, I have good spy/virus protection which is why i was surprised by it.

Is it up to date too?

In most cases just having a virus scanner/firewall isn't enough. You just have to think which link you open and which one you don't.

As I said.. we can do everything to protect ourselves but it seems hackers etc. are always one step ahead of the protection.

I have my account hacked way way back (okay at least over a year ago) and thought I was protected. Since then I switched to firefox (with Noscript) and seem to of reduced all my occurrences of virus/spyware etc. but I still get them once in a while.

I was gone from Wow for 2 weeks due to a friend dying and when i came back my account was hacked. They got me back on, on the 24th and then today I got an email saying my account has been banned for forever, no warning, nothing for downloading add-ons. All I have is auctioneer, quest helper, the usual stuff and if there is something on there whomever hacked my account put it on because i only changed my password and email the day they got me back on the 24th and checked 1 of 5 characters to find out he had been leveled over 7 levels but all my gold was gone and my packs were filled with stuff i have NEVER seen before. I then logged off because for the last few days I have been attending the funeral of my friend that died. Today is the first time that I had a chance to log in since I found out I had been hacked and they changed my password and i checked that char and thats when i found out that i had been banned for add-on's. I have NEVER had a problem in the 6 months that I have been playing or the 5 years playing Ultima Online as a Game Master even, thats how much I follow the rules. I am completely devestated, someone PLEASE help me!!!!! I need help I am getting royally screwed.

Sounds like your account was hacked and the hackers used a BOT (automated grinder) to level some toons and make some gold.

Did you report your account being hacked to Blizzard Customer service? If you do just called them back up and say
"Hey I reported my account hacked on (insert date here), you helped me reset my passwords and now my account is banned. Is it possible that the hackers caused the ban?"

That should probably do it..

However if you just logged in and reset your password then your options are limited as it will appear that you used a "leveling service" whom you willingly gave your password too (against TOC) who then used an automated system (BOT - against TOC) to level your toon. If it appears to blizzard that that is what happened (and they will use the log of IP address that signed into you account and when they signed in to confirm) then its unlikely you will be able to get your account back.

Sorry... go the first route if you reported your account hack and I wish you the best of luck!