Something that might happen to more hacked people soon ;;

[Caldor]

Hello Guys!

I was one of the 1st who lost their accounts to the mass account thefts that have happened over the last few weeks. I had a lot of trouble reclaiming my account(I'm from Germany but got an US account). I even had to contact the police which after about 1 week got my account back for me. I lost about 2 mil in equipment and gil while my rare/ex equipment fortunately didn't take any damage. I've almost recovered from the loss but now got banned by SE. I was playing at about 4:30 am GMT+1 when I suddenly got disconnected. When I tried to log back on my account I got the message that the service for my POL ID had been stopped. I thought at 1st it just had something to do with my credit card since I disputed a few FFXI charges to lock down my account when it was still under RMT control. When the customer service was finally available I contacted them to get some information why my account was actually suspended/banned. They told me that someone made a FFXI account with exactly the same information I used for my account. That someone got himself banned(I'm positive it's the one who had my account and therefore had my information saved on my account). And since my account had exactly the same informations entered it was banned as well. I've listed a ban complaint already but I was told this could take days and up to several weeks. I'll keep you updated on any further developments.


Bye Caldor(Thf75/War75) on Fenrir

[ronin sparthos]

Again they play right into the RMTs hands.....

As if getting your naked character back wasnt bad enough, you get hammed by SE for being late as fuck with the ban hammer....

SE is starting to remind me of the guy from the Pink Panther....

[Tajin]

At this point I would just quit the game, so much fail from SE customer support.

[vagus]

wow, that's pretty bad if this is confirmed. SE is starting to look really bad. I estimate atleast over 150+ accounts stolen and nothing done about it.

[Lexa]

Well, this kinda happened to a guy who used to play on my old server, though not in the same way. He once upon a time used a bot tool, then got banned, and unfortunately also got another account dragged down with him (I think it was a family member or cousin or something), because he was using his CC to pay for both POLs. Even though his family member or w/e had never used a bot tool or illegal program in their life.

SE can ban any POL account if they're connected by info/CC info, etc, if one of the linked accounts is caught doing something wrong. It's completely retarded.

[ronin sparthos]

wow, that's pretty bad if this is confirmed. SE is starting to look really bad. I estimate atleast over 150+ accounts stolen and nothing done about it.

According to two SE representatives its over 2400 compromised account reports from mid-Nov to now.

SE doesnt look bad for this blunder, they are bad for letting RMT get away with this so easily.

[Mizango]

Hello Guys!

I was one of the 1st who lost their accounts to the mass account thefts that have happened over the last few weeks. I had a lot of trouble reclaiming my account(I'm from Germany but got an US account). I even had to contact the police which after about 1 week got my account back for me. I lost about 2 mil in equipment and gil while my rare/ex equipment fortunately didn't take any damage. I've almost recovered from the loss but now got banned by SE. I was playing at about 4:30 am GMT+1 when I suddenly got disconnected. When I tried to log back on my account I got the message that the service for my POL ID had been stopped. I thought at 1st it just had something to do with my credit card since I disputed a few FFXI charges to lock down my account when it was still under RMT control. When the customer service was finally available I contacted them to get some information why my account was actually suspended/banned. They told me that someone made a FFXI account with exactly the same information I used for my account. That someone got himself banned(I'm positive it's the one who had my account and therefore had my information saved on my account). And since my account had exactly the same informations entered it was banned as well. I've listed a ban complaint already but I was told this could take days and up to several weeks. I'll keep you updated on any further developments.


Bye Caldor(Thf75/War75) on Fenrir

Ouch Sorry to hear about that Cald, Take care and Good luck with everything. SE is a fucking joke, it is like people that get hacked and manage to get their shit back cant win for losing.

[Paulisdead]

SE seriously need to lose their entire player base over this. I love this game to bits and I would hate to see the game die but I really hope that they do lose the vast majority of their playerbase just so they learn (if they had a future) that the customer is number one stop taking the piss out of your most valid customer you fucking idiots and sort this shit out already.

I cant see how hard it is to rectify this problem ( Apart from the fact you registration server will shit itself when 400,000 users have to secure thier acounts with some basic info like Mothers Maiden Name. First pets name etc) For goodness sake sort it out already before its too late. I really hope you as a company SE go bankrupt in the next few months..... even if that does mean I have to stop playing, because quite frankly you deserve it.

[Melchiah]

SE is starting to remind me of the guy from the Pink Panther....

Inspector Clouseau.

[Afrohatch]

I cant see how hard it is to rectify this problem ( Apart from the fact you registration server will shit itself when 400,000 users have to secure thier acounts with some basic info like Mothers Maiden Name. First pets name etc)

Honestly, that's the best way to fix it...have a separate password to be able to change the CC info, and it'd be a -lot- harder to steal accounts like this. People are taking full advantage of this right now because they know SE won't do shit about it.

[Kaisha]

According to two SE representatives its over 2400 compromised account reports from mid-Nov to now.

SE doesnt look bad for this blunder, they are bad for letting RMT get away with this so easily.

Out of curiosity, where'd you get this information from?

Honestly, that's the best way to fix it...have a separate password to be able to change the CC info, and it'd be a -lot- harder to steal accounts like this. People are taking full advantage of this right now because they know SE won't do shit about it.

Even if they couldn't change the CC info, they'd still have enough time for most compromised accounts to do their business quickly and get off the toon.

Regardless, it's disgusting how bad the RMT are abusing the system, I really didn't think they could one-up the gil inflation that happened prior to Xmas2005.

[ronin sparthos]

Out of curiosity, where'd you get this information from?

Various people including myself who have talked to SE reps keep getting the magic number 2400 regarding the amount of accounts stolen since mid november so the amount of accounts reported stolen on BG alone is only the tip of the iceberg for SE to deal with.

2 reps ive talked to have used this exact figure when i inquired about it.

RMT are milking this as much as possible, capitalizing on SEs lack of caring for the situation / rapid action.

[malak]

At this point I would just quit the game, so much fail from SE customer support.

^ This guy's right. If SE dicked me over like that, I would pretty much tell them to fuck off. All of the threads I've read since the whole thing started happening just proves that SE's customer service is one of the worst active today. They must treat their customer service reps like shit as well since they obviously don't care about helping anyone. The whole thing is pretty sad.

[Faris]

If this increases with SE ignoring the problem, FFXI wont last too long. So far, its been slowly dying out.

[mrinv]

Just from reading the OP it seems the rmt are going to start using the people whose accounts they hacked credit card info to create new characters to do quests that can be done for money or decent priced items within the economy atm, (I don't play anymore so i don't know if there's any new good money/item quests with wings)with flee hacking tools or pos and whatnot as to not get there own rmt chars cc#s banned. Of course I can't say this for certain, but if it is there may be a serious problem in cc theft.

[Wizerd]

Just from reading the OP it seems the rmt are going to start using the people whose accounts they hacked credit card info to create new characters to do quests that can be done for money or decent priced items within the economy atm, (I don't play anymore so i don't know if there's any new good money/item quests with wings)with flee hacking tools or pos and whatnot as to not get there own rmt chars cc#s banned. Of course I can't say this for certain, but if it is there may be a serious problem in cc theft.

They can't, because only the first 4 and last 4 numbers of your CC are shown if you go to view it (maybe none now? I dunno if they changed it). The expiration isn't shown either.

Also, if the old CC info was on the account, no one would be having issues getting their accounts back.

[Infini]

Talk about kicking a person when theyre down. This is pathetic they should have more intelligence about sorting out this stuff i mean for cryin out loud they got IP logs they should have been able to confirm with those or note down that the account had been hacked by (insertcuntragchinesegilsellernamehere). If this horseshit keeps up even id consider quitting the game .

[Apelila]

Ok BG, here's something thats been bothering me the last couple of days.

Banned in October: 6750 = october
Banned in November: 4400
Banned in December: 12460

23610 account total Ban-inated. #'s pulled from the play online website.
These numbers are pulled from the playonline website and are reported as "playonline accounts" not content ID's - which indicates that these are not individual characters but whole accounts (banks, mules and all).

The point: how are they using unique credit cards for every account?

Assuming that one credit card is paying for 20 RMT accounts at a time, thats 1180 credit cards. Am I missing something here? Using the same rule, that's 1180 different addresses which, if they are US based can't be PO boxes thanks to new laws in 2004 and 2005. I know WoW has prepaid cards, does / did something like that exist for FFXI once that allows these people to hide annonymously when re-registering accounts? How are they able to so effectively mass spawn accounts?

Also, thats in the last 3 months, not year. Playonlines updates only go so far back as October.

Using the otherwiki I would estimate (since there is no main STF page) that between nov 2006 and march 2007 25+(alot) of accounts where banned. I based this on a graph showing the months and accounts banned, counting 25k is the number of accounts banned at the peaks, not the inbetween bannings.
It would be safe to say that if you added all the numbers up that have been thrown around in the past, 40k+ would be a realistic number. I'm to lazy to go digging through advanced for the accounts bant threads.

So 48+k (23+25) different playonline accounts is a conservative estimate for the number SE says they have banned, never to return. I think they're not keeping as much information as they say they are about people they've banned in the past, thats to high of a number for each one to be unique. Or am I thinking about this to hard? I'm not saying they haven't been doing anything, I'm just saying that since about...June the numbers have seemed inflated.

[Rescue]

Ok BG, here's something thats been bothering me the last couple of days.

Banned in October: 6750 = october
Banned in November: 4400
Banned in December: 12460

23610 account total Ban-inated. #'s pulled from the play online website.
These numbers are pulled from the playonline website and are reported as "playonline accounts" not content ID's - which indicates that these are not individual characters but whole accounts (banks, mules and all).

The point: how are they using unique credit cards for every account?

Assuming that one credit card is paying for 20 RMT accounts at a time, thats 1180 credit cards. Am I missing something here? Using the same rule, that's 1180 different addresses which, if they are US based can't be PO boxes thanks to new laws in 2004 and 2005. I know WoW has prepaid cards, does / did something like that exist for FFXI once that allows these people to hide annonymously when re-registering accounts? How are they able to so effectively mass spawn accounts?

Also, thats in the last 3 months, not year. Playonlines updates only go so far back as October.

Using the otherwiki I would estimate (since there is no main STF page) that between nov 2006 and march 2007 25+(alot) of accounts where banned. I based this on a graph showing the months and accounts banned, counting 25k is the number of accounts banned at the peaks, not the inbetween bannings.
It would be safe to say that if you added all the numbers up that have been thrown around in the past, 40k+ would be a realistic number. I'm to lazy to go digging through advanced for the accounts bant threads.

So 48+k (23+25) different playonline accounts is a conservative estimate for the number SE says they have banned, never to return. I think they're not keeping as much information as they say they are about people they've banned in the past, thats to high of a number for each one to be unique. Or am I thinking about this to hard? I'm not saying they haven't been doing anything, I'm just saying that since about...June the numbers have seemed inflated.

SE lie about something? No they would never do that.

Oh BTW pigs can fly to....

[Kyreth]

Far as account numbers getting banned going up, it's a description of how RMT has tried to adapt.

First, all their regular accounts started going bye-bye. RMT replaced them.

Then, they realized STFU was serious. Tactics swapped to "We know these are getting banhammered, quick exploits." (Quest warphacking for $$$, mass fishbotting)

Now, with a bunch of compromised accounts, they're milking them for all they're worth knowing S-E's policy (Japanese company, policy is all) will require that regardless of who owned the accounts, they'll get wiped for obvious abuse. In the process, I'm betting some of the sick fucks think what the addicts will do is buy new accounts and Gil to replace the very same stuff that got raped from them in the first place.

It's also in the interests of RMT to damage FFXI...because they're making money quicker and more efficently stealing it directly from the players than by going through S-E and their customers don't care where the Gil comes from. I'm betting multiple stolen accounts got put on the same CC's, since they hardly expect them to be around at the end of the month.

Organized crime sucks.