Ok, so I woke up this morning to an Email telling me my WoW account has been banned for buying or selling gold or something. There's a few problems with that, biggest of which being that I do not now, nor have I ever played WoW. How an account I don't Have can be banned I don't know. I'm assuming it's a phishing email, but I thought it would be a good idea to ask you all what you think is going on. The mailers name was just the date and time "2015-04-14 17:27:13" with the actual email address being "
a0952060155@gmail.com". Hmmm, that seems totally like a legit email address and name Blizzard would use. /s The weird thing is that the links seem to be for the official site, but I'm not clicking to find out. Here's the email in question.
***Notice of Account Closure***
Account Name: [redacted]
Reason for Closure: Terms of Use Violation -- Exploitative Activity: Abuse of the Economy
This account was closed because one or more characters were identified exchanging, or contributing to the exchange of, in-game property (items or gold) for "real-world" currency. This exchange process negatively impacts the World of Warcraft game environment by detracting from the value of the in-game economy.
Even if this is the result of account sharing, the account owner can still be held responsible for the penalty because of the impact it had on the game environment.
We've found the above behavior is many times directly related to groups responsible for compromising World of Warcraft accounts; we take these issues very seriously. To better understand our position against exploitative activity and the risks involved, please review this article: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/services/anti-gold/
The exploitative activity that took place on this account violates the World of Warcraft Terms of Use. We ask you take a moment to review these terms at http://us.blizzard.com/company/legal/index.html. Note that additional Terms of Use violations may result in more severe actions against this account, up to and including permanent closure.
If you believe your account was compromised, please go to the following website https://us.battle.net/account/support/account-recovery.html. Our support staff will assist you as soon as possible.
Regards,
Customer Services
Blizzard Entertainment
The other possibility is someone stole my email account and used it to sign up for a WoW account to use for gold farming or something. Which really begs the question of why do that and not just make a throwaway gmail account. Last night happened to be the first time in a while that I've logged in to my email from my computer, which happened to be the email I got this message on, and I had to enter my password which could have been stolen then I guess. How a virus got on to my computer is also a mystery as even before I installed anti virus the computer rarely had virus problems. I now have Kaspersky, which I happen to be using right now to do a full scan on my laptop, desktop, and tablet because of this.
I haven't enough time all day to really do much looking (I would have spent the time typing this message anyway) ti see if there are any reports of this happening to other people. I did however quickly look this morning and found reports of a poorly done WoW phishing email from a few years back, but it had the obvious "go here to prove it's your account" phishing links. I also found a report of an email that from what I remember briefly skimming it, looked almost exactly like this one, but the other people posting on the thread said it was legit.
So, anyone got any advice? Do you think it's a random email spammed to all addresses the spammers can find? Should I go and change passwords on all my accounts everywhere?