Credit Card Fraud involving Blizzard Entertainment

Captain's_Wife · 11 June 2007 at 5:46PM

I found this forum after doing a Google on Blizzard Ent. fraud.

I called Blizzard customer service (U.S.) 800-592-5499 and spoke with someone by the name of Rameses A. His company email address is ramesesa.support@blizzard.com

Rameses said that Blizzard is well aware of this fraud problem. "What are they doing about it?", I asked. Aside from telling me what an efficient and secure order taker he is, he said that no orders are processed unless all information pertaining to the card holder matches the gaming account.

Rameses made a search on Blizzard's registry to see if my name was registered for gaming.
He asked for the state and country of my residence, and using a first/last name search nothing (of course) was found.

Rameses' search negated Blizzard's claim that all information pertaining to the cardholder is verified prior to approving the order.

I asked Rameses to look up whom has registered their gaming account using the information I was about to provide over the phone from my credit card. He told me that could only be done through their fraud dept. - via my financial institution.
However, I bet that Rameses would've been a happy chappy to process another order using the exact same details I had on the ready. Go figure!

Blizzard Entertainment and it's employee's are ENABLERS. They could care less about the victim's involved in this massive theft. Why should they care? They're making allot of money.

I contacted the fraud dept. at Bank of America in which my card is serviced. I'm 100% protected (free of charge), and B of A is in the process of taking the money back from Blizzard.

I'm interested in filing a class-action lawsuit for the neglectful actions of Blizzard Entertainment. Any suggestions?

Stonemeadow · 11 June 2007 at 6:57PM

BLIZZARD-ENT*ELECUPGRD 800-592-5499 CA $ 21.53 on June 6th

Called CC they refunded me immediately.

John_Pierpoint · 12 June 2007 at 12:01AM

Hi Captain's Wife,

Welcome to MSE.com

Would I be right in thinking you are hopeful of taking action on the West side of "the pond".

Unfortunately here in the UK our government has decided that we cannot report fraud to our police authority any more. If you are a cynic like me, you put this down to an epidemic of credit card fraud making a mess of the government's figures to support their claim to be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6724942,00.html
("The Guardian" newspaper has moved on and this link no longer works)

I have used credit cards since they were first introduced in the UK over 35 years ago, BUT having been the victim of a modest example of personal data theft, I must be on a "watch" list and can no longer rely on my credit cards being accepted for legitimate transactions. :mad:

If you have got the time, have a read of this thread to get a feel of the authorities total inability to close down a teenage fraudster.

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=331106

(I am sad to see that this thread has been taken down. It featured MSE members coming together to find out who was behind a series of fraudulent web sites offering goods and services at suspiciously low prices. It even had the fraudster himself laughing at his victims, by breaking the password of someone with the ID of Beardybob (if I remember correctly). There were entries from journalists trying to catch up with the scandal. Eventually, after living the life of Riley on 100,000's of stolen money for many months, the Old Bill woke up and got him into court, where a kindly Lady judge patted him on the head and more or less let him off.
Perhaps MSE has been forced to remove the thread (rather than the crook's name) by some misguided clause in the rehabilitation of offenders' act?!? JP 27nov08).

Good luck with your efforts to tackle these Stateside *&!"!!?

John.

My modest brush with some snivelling little fraudster, which is still causing me problems, is recorded here:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=5398736#post5398736

Captain's_Wife · 12 June 2007 at 5:58AM

Thanks, John for the links.

I'm sorry for your loss to theft, but your experience has provided a wealth of knowledge for all.

Our previous theft encounter happened at the Blarneystone in NYC while buying sandwiches.
There was a new kid working the register, and we noticed because he was taking unusually long to process our Visa debit card.

A few days later we received a call from our fraud department, saying that over $600 USD had been queued for fuel/goods at various merchants in NYC.

We filed a complaint with the NYPD.

It turns out this sandwich-slinging "ankle biter" was found in possession of a machine that imprints the copied CC numbers to unslated (blank) credit cards.
He took the cards to self-pay fueling stations to make sure the cards worked.
After that was a shopping trip down 5th Avenue.

Fortunately, most major (U.S. based) financial institution's have an aggressive working relationship with the FBI to track down these criminals.

My interest in a class-action lawsuit is to hold E-Businesses accountable for sloppy, incomplete/inaccurate payment practices.
If there is a sufficient number of complainant's to petition together I'm told representation by a lawyer is possible.

In situations like this it's not so bad to have "Big Brother" watching over you.
I'll update my post as more information becomes available.

Spangled · 12 June 2007 at 4:08PM

Exactly the same problem with me. Two fraudulent payments to Blizzard Ent for $19.99 and $39.99 made on my Bank of America account. Have cancelled my card and have to sign an affadavit to get the money back. Worringly, there are three further "pending" payments on the same account all for $3.03 originating from Taiwan.

lotbroek · 14 June 2007 at 1:51PM

here a message from the netherlands, i've been hit too, first i got a mail from ebay that my cardnumber was used to eather create an acount or to pay, after two days i noticed a 4 time blling of my cc i was not aware of:
12-06-2007 BLIZZARD-ENT*ELECUPGRD 800-592-5499 CA 15,12
12-06-2007 BLIZZARD-ENT*ELECUPGRD 800-592-5499 CA 15,12
12-06-2007 BLIZZARD-ENT*ELECUPGRD 800-592-5499 CA 30,27
12-06-2007 BLIZZARD ENT*WOW SUB BLIZZARD.COM CA 11,35

looks like some kid playing online games with our money, my cc is now blocked
many thanks to ebay to warn me.

smogzy · 14 June 2007 at 8:54PM

Sugar_Junkie wrote: »

I would have thought it's much more likely to be goldsellers buying accounts to farm gold and advertise with. It's big business and a huge problem at the minute.

I agree. It does sound like gold farmers using your cards to open accounts.

If you dont know what gold farmers are I'll explain...

Online Games like WOW are very popular (over 6 million players in WOW alone). One thing is needed to advance in the game is the games own virtual currency (gold). It can take people weeks, if not months to earn the gold to say buy your charicter a horse, or that new set of armour you want. Understandably people dont have the time, or the patience to put in the time to earn gold so they want to buy it with real money. This is how the blackmarket of gold farmers was created.

Gold farmers often run from the far east (but not always) in sweat shops where people are paid a pitance to play the game 24/7 doing nothing but gathering (farming) gold. This is either done by peopel playing the game in shifts or through a computer controlled player, know as a bot.
This gold is then advertised in game and sold for real currency.

This is of course against the games terms of service and accounts which are caught are banned. So gold farmers need quite a steady supply of fresh accounts which of course cost them money in subscription fees. But not if they steal your CC details.

Here`s a video about gold farmers for those interested, suprisingly its big business...

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-8750959418799794434&q=gold+farmers&total=97&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Captain's_Wife · 15 June 2007 at 1:25AM

Here's a link about a pending class-action lawsuit against IGE, a (Hong Kong based) gold farming company.

http://www.wowinsider.com/2007/05/31/class-action-lawsuit-filed-against-ige/2

It also contains a direct link to view the actual lawsuit in Adobe PDF format.

http://terranova.blogs.com/ige-classaction.pdf

We had a grand total of $406.35 USD worth of pending transactions when we froze our assets.
Fortunately, Bank of America has returned the funds to us from the below listed merchants.

Summary of unauthorized merchants in our case:
Truition, Inc
MFI
Blizzard ENT

I noticed in the very beginning of this thread someone mentioned "Blizzard ENT is a reputable gaming company",
and implied they shouldn't be given the discerning "hairy eyeball".

I must very strongly DISAGREE with that individual.

You can buy almost anything online regardless if you are the authorized cardholder.
It just depends on whether you are caught.

After speaking with my attorney, I was advised that it IS the merchant's responsibility to verify the legitimacy of the assumed cardholder.

I asked regarding the criminal investigation to pursue the true thief in my case.

I was told very simply when the merchant accepts the CC payment and the funds are cleared on both sides, they assume responsibility for accepting the payment.

It's rare to spend the extra (government) funds to chase online theft, when the merchant makes an easy target for being in possession of stolen money.

This advice was for U.S. law. I'm not sure how things stand for my friend's across the pond.

kitty_wiggins · 15 June 2007 at 3:16AM

I was hit by 3 Charges from BLIZZARD-ENT*ELECUPGRD. On a Visa card from Chase Bank. When I called and hit the "fraud report" button, voice mail asked me about 5 other charges which I also denied. I talked then to customer agent who did not seem familiar with Blizzard, and I didn't discover until afterwards that it was about WOW. He canceled card, and I got free credit report: no evidence of identity theft. The charges were on May 8 and 9 for 19.99. I had done nothing unusual with my card; I use it a lot and shop a lot on the internet and have for years with no problem. After reading all these posts, I am not convinced it has anything to do with card usage. Also, I cannot find anything in the news about this problem. Just the selling of virtual gold.

Ark027 · 15 June 2007 at 5:38AM

Tonight I noticed 2 charges in my bank account from:
WORLD OF WARCRAFT CDKE

in the amount of $26.60 ea. upon running a google search I got this forums thread results. Needless to say I've already cancel'd my debit card. I guess I'll be trying to get my $53 back in the next few days.

As for how I think it happened... I am a WoW player. Have been a subscriber for a long time. Less than a week ago I found a torrent (p2p software) that you can download which would enable you to setup an offline private server to play the game solo. (I saw no wrong in this since I still have an active subscription and blizzard is not losing their money for me playing offline) so I decided to give it a shot. The software (called ManGos) worked but now I'm going through this.

Should have known that anyone smart enough to hack the game is smart eno ugh to steal personal info from my PC.

Credit Card Fraud involving Blizzard Entertainment

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