Monday 11 January 2010

I Don't Play WoW

Over the last few weeks, I have noticed a surprising large number of phishing emails in my inbox. All allegedly coming from blizzard.com relating to my World of Warcraft account.

They have improved as well.

1) The first ones where every 3-4 days, telling me that I appear to be trying to sell my WoW account. This is against the rules, and I am in danger of having the account shutdown as per guidelines if this can be proven.

- I find this difficult to believe for 2 reasons:
i) I don't have WoW account or even own/play a copy of the game
ii) If I did, I doubt (from past gaming experience) I'd ever have one worthy enough to actually sell.

2) Then came the ones with all the misspellings that you 'would never notice'.

- I wouldn't follow these links because:
i) See 1i
ii) I have a pretty good grasp of the English Language, and I can spell (I only ever failed 1 spelling test at school, and the word did have more than 3 syllables)

3) Then a ramp up of number - 2 a day, and the misspellings disappeared.

- I wouldn't follow because:
i) See 1i
ii) I am not as thick as two short planks

Now, Blizzard, if you are trying to contact me, then please feel free to cancel my account. My email address is already being fraudulently used, and so I am happy for you to ban it (please note, the email address used is different to this one).

If, however, guys who are phishing for the account details - please give up. I am getting rather tired of picking apart your emails for potential problems. You need to realise that, if this is to work, you need to be a little bit more subtle about your approach than you are. People are waking up to the fact that these emails are simply not real - the Ebay/Paypal ones have stopped, just give it a rest. Why don't you take up real 'Fishing'? Perhaps you could make money selling whatever you catch, surplus to what you eat. Start a business, and become a useful member of whichever society you live in.

For anyone who does read this blog, and thinks that I should be playing WoW, especially as a Perl Software Developer/Techie/Geek/Nerd, please don't spam/flame me. I chose the life I live, and I am happy with Lego StarWars and other simple Wii games.

Rant over.

2 comments:

mdk said...

I don't play WoW as many others around me do, but my WoW friend tells me Blizzard sufferred quite a few attacks late last year and so there will be a raft of false 'phishing' emails and ones from Blizzard warning you that the email address is being used fraudulently. You should be able to recognise the Blizzard ones as they are usually html based with the logo.
Also - I love Lego games on the Wii, I play them with the WiiJog controller so I have to run to make the character move - currently finishing Wii Batman so that I can move onto Indy 2.

Unknown said...

I haven't seen the WiiJog controller. I'll have to find that, as I spend so much time playing these, it would be more exercise :)

You really think people would have better things to do with their time than hack/'phish for' accounts these days. Clearly a full time job, a marriage, a kid, a mortgage and a Wii leaves me without real contact to the world around me!

Thanks for your comment. Nice to know someone is reading my inane ramblings.