Greetings All:
I just thought I'd post an FYI for people who value their WOW accounts. Scammers are running wild these days, and every year it seems they get more and more creative in their methods for trying to scam people out of accounts. It happened to me, once. I don't want it to happen to you.
Here are a few ways people are trying to scam these days
1. In game whispers -- A day doesn't pass that I don't get a whisper from someone posing as a blizzard employee. Ususally they will tell you that you have been found guilty of some offense and that your account will be banned if you don't follow a certain hyperlink to validate your identity. Their names often attempt to imitate blizzard employees: "blizzbrendan," "Blizzjohn," etc etc. Often these links will take you to a very convincing reproduction of the blizzard website, asking for your account name and password. Enter it, and you can be guaranteed that you've just been compromised. The best thing to is flag these whispers as spam and remember the following:
Blizzard employees will almost never contact you in game, and if they do they will have a blue and white blizzard logo beside their name.
Blizzard will never threaten you with action against your account. They will take the action first and then send an email to your registered email address.
Blizzard employees will never ask for your password. In fact, they don't even know it.
2. Every day I get dozens of emails in my spam box claiming to be from blizzard. These emails take many form, from offering free in game items to threatening account action unless you click on a link to verify. Needless to say, these are all fake and phishing attempts to steal your account information. Some of them even look official, and the email might even say it's from wowaccountadmin or another official looking blizzard name. There are two surefire ways to identify a phishing attempt
A: Poor grammar and spelling.
B: Threats against your account (again, blizzard never threatens account action; they lock your account and THEN notify you if there is a problem)
C: check the header information from where the e-mail truly originated. If it's really from blizzard, it will originate from blizzard.com, not hotmail.com or any other source.