As we've seen in the past, accounts can be hacked and taken by gold spammers. Myself and some friends have been hit with this in the past. So I'm going to share with all of you some information about how to keep your account safe.
1 - Link your ANET and NCSoft accounts to multiple e-mail accounts.
1a. Have one account be Gmail. Gmail seems to be the most secure.
1b. For your backup e-mail use a UN/PW combo that is very different from normal and uncharacteristic of you.
1c. Make sure the PW is a combination of numbers and letters at least 10 characters long.
1d. Never use a word out of the dictionary etc.
1e. Make sure you link your GW account(s) to your account as well.
1f. Physically write down your UN/PW.
1g. DO NOT EVER SAVE THE UN/PW TO YOUR COMPUTER EVER!
2 - Physically write down your CD key for all Guild Wars games you own.
2a. Take pictures of the box, CDs and CD key and store in a safe place.
2b. Make several copies of the physical copy of your CD keys
2c. NEVER HAVE A DIGITAL COPY OF YOUR CD KEY! (no making a MS Word document and saving the keys there)
2d. Make copies of your credit card / debit card report that has the GW purchase on it
2e. Make a copy of your receipt that you purchased GW with. If its a physical recipt go to a copy center and have the copy notorized. If it is digital take screen shots and save a copy of the webpage. Print out both and put the digital copies onto a flash drive.
2f. Store all of those pieces of information in a safe place and make multiple copies if need be.
3 - Do not ever hit reply on an e-mail you receive fomr someone claiming to be from ANET / NCSoft or any other organization that seems official.
3a. Open a new browser window and use a search engine (preferably Google) to find the page
3b. Open the Cached page from the Google servers.
3c. Log in from there and see if the email came from them
3d. If it did, good. If not copy and paste the e-mail in a report to ANET / NCSoft about the e-mail.
NOTE - I am currently requesting some pieces of information from IC3 (see their site at www.ic3.gov) to see if I should recommend certain points of action. The IC3 has responded and the information is at the bottom with a plain copy/paste.
4 - Install a good antivirus software program.
4a. If you are buying one get Trend Micro. A bit over protective in many instances but a good quality program.
4b. If you are not paying get Avast!. I've recommended that one for many people and would switch to it if I need to drop Trend Micro.
4c. Get MalwareBytes as your anti-malware program.
4d. Sign up for a tech support forum. I would suggest www.techsupportforum.com I've used it for quite some time and have had good results from there.
4e. Scan at least once a week. I would suggest scanning twice a week if you browse multiple websites. That is both antivirus and anti malware
4f. Do not install 3rd party programs that are said to work with with Guild Wars.
Follow these steps and you should be a bit safer. We can never be 100% safe from those threats out there. However we can make it much more difficult for people to screw us over.
Here's the e-mail sent to and the response from IC3.
From me to IC3:
Thank you in advance for taking the time to read over and answer my questions.
The purpose of this contact is based around a project I'm working on. It is a guide that players in MMOGs (Massive Multi-player Online Games) can follow to help` protect themselves. I know that sounds weird but I remember being told by law professors I had that the IC3 was the place to go for reporting Internet crimes based around websites and the like, as that is their specialty.
Out of the many issues that the MMOG community has to deal with only two of them I find myself wondering if we should report them to the IC3. One issue is phishing. There are many times where individuals posing as administrators, moderators or developers of a particular MMOG request personal and private information based around the account in order to hijack to it. Many players have personal information tied to the account. So in essence they will not only lose access to their account in many instances, but their personal information becomes at serious risk. There are also games in which you can link a credit / debit card to the account, which again puts the players at risk.
For this issues, should players report this to IC3? Or should we continue to report these issues to the game companies and then inform any company that we have a credit or debit card to?
The second issue we run into is hackers. Individuals who gain access to our e-mail account, in game account or game company account. Many companies have ways for individual players to sign up and create an account that can be used to track a variety of things. A feature mostly used is inputting and linking our games via CD Keys to a central access point.
Now, I understand this item is far more complex than above, but should we receive any information from any of the companies / providers affected by the hacker, should we pass along the information received or encourage the company to contact you or the appropriate institution?
Again, thank you. Please feel free to put in links for more information and/or contacts to other organizations and institutions that might be able to help answer the questions.
What did IC3 respond you ask? Well that's below:
This is not weird at all since we do receive complaints from online players of various games, and MMOGs are no different.
First let me explain a little more about IC3. The IC3 is co-sponsored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C). The IC3 is not a Law Enforcement Agency, therefore we do not investigate. Complaints filed via this website are processed and may be referred to federal, state, local or international law enforcement or regulatory agencies for possible investigation. Any investigation opened on any complaint filed on this website is initiated at the discretion of the law enforcement and/or regulatory agency receiving the complaint information.
Regarding your first concern, we generally tell any victim of internet crime to report the fraud/crime not only to us but also any other companies that might be involved. Because we do not conduct any investigations here, it is always best to make sure everyone involved knows about the crime. With sending a complaint to us, we will send it on to an agency for possible investigation.
Regarding your second concern, please feel free to let anyone victim of internet crime to file a complaint with us. If a company is the victim of an Internet crime, they can file a complaint for each instance of Internet crime on our website at www.ic3.gov. Be sure to include as much information as possible about the yourself
(i.e. name, e-mail address, mailing address, etc.), the perpetrator, and the Internet crime that you are reporting in order to expedite your complaint. If the fields provided do not meet your exact needs (as a business), you may include a narrative in the complaint information.
I hope this is helpful and if you have any further questions, please feel free to ask. Thank you and have a wonderful day!
For those of you who want to pass this information along - PLEASE DO SO! Just make sure to copy all of the information and give a link back to this thread and site. This is to allow people to verify the information and double check on things posted. If they want to they can also ask me questions directly they will have the ability to do so.
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