Thread: Hacked Accounts?

Recently two of my kinmates had their accounts hacked, and all of their characters delelted.

Many of our kin were on when it happened, and there was nothing we could do as we watched his toons deleted one after another.

We have mulled it over and read the new restoration policy, which seem a bit ambiguous. Has anyone else had this experience? Can you share what you actually got back from Turbine and how long it takes?

Some of our thoughts and observations, please feel free to share:

1. Taking screen shots of your bonded items such as BG armor etc. to verify your armor and high end gear.

2. The usual change of PW and scanning of the computer.

3. We watched as one character from our kinnie's toon ran back and forth from the vault to mailbox mailing his portable items. There was over 500 gold in the account, hence good evidence that it was not a F2P mule account since F2Ps are limited to the amount of gold they can hold. So the actual hackers holding accounts are from paying players.

4. We think the characters are being deleted to prevent back checking on the IP the hacker used.

Any other ideas anyone may be able to come up with to help protect our accounts or catch those who are doing this would be appreciated.

Acor

Originally Posted by Acor

1. Taking screen shots of your bonded items such as BG armor etc. to verify your armor and high end gear.

You can do this for your own comfort. Turbine only uses information collect internally from their own servers.

Originally Posted by Acor

3. We watched as one character from our kinnie's toon ran back and forth from the vault to mailbox mailing his portable items. There was over 500 gold in the account, hence good evidence that it was not a F2P mule account since F2Ps are limited to the amount of gold they can hold. So the actual hackers holding accounts are from paying players.

Correct. Often they are using stolen credit cards to create paying accounts.

Originally Posted by Acor

4. We think the characters are being deleted to prevent back checking on the IP the hacker used.

In some games, the internal tracking mechanisms to follow the gold requires all the characters in the chain to exist. They delete the characters to delay or prevent the operator from following the trail. Characters are internally tracked via a number that you can not see assigned at creation. From what I understand, deletion does not do anything to help the thief in this game. The character still exists on Turbine servers with a flag stating the character is deleted.

The IP is tracked at the account level, nothing anyone does at the character level matters. Some games like Eve Online will challenge you during the authentication process with additional questions if they do not like the IP you are using to log in.

We had the same thing happen to a kin member last weekend (I think it was like 1am EST Saturday morning) while he was out of town.

As of last night, all of his characters were restored, and last time we spoke, the only things he was missing were a couple of LIs on one alt that he had been in the process of leveling up.

I haven't asked him about security/what he thinks happened, but in my personal opinion, having the same login credentials for the forum as for the game is not helping.

I hope things work out for your kin-mates. Tell Lallie that Megin says hello.