Friendly hacker or "good" luck?

First of all this is not a QQ thread, I'm just curious...

Basically, I haven't played since Saturday and logged in today to find all of my characters' armor gone and most of their weapons/stuff as well (save a few customized weapons, items, and junk greens). At this point, I'm pissed as hell. I know it's the common cry of the victimized, but I never did any of the unsafe things that make you bait for account theft. I will admit that I don't change my password very often, but that's all.

But now we come to the real subject of this thread. I run over to my Xunlai account, expecting the worst, to find 638k in my storage. I'm pretty sure I had around 18K on Saturday.

My question is, did I catch the theft before the guy had a chance to move all the dough, or did he leave that for me? I find it hard to believe that someone who hacked my account would one: leave my password the same, and two: be so lazy/dumb as to leave money behind when he had all weekend. I also kinda find it hard to believe that he could've liquidated all my possessions into so much cash so quickly, what with a decent number of my good stuff customized.

An extra 620k may just be enough to re-armor my characters (10 characters, all had elite armor) near to what they had previously, provided I don't buy elite headpieces (never did anyway). And that seems almost too coincidental to me. Although, that doesn't even begin cover the cost of all the nice weapons I had for all those characters (he even found the sweet stuff hidden on my heros ), nor the lost materials.

I seem to have also been "lucky" in that he didn't check, or didn't want, the stuff on my two pvp mule characters.

I think I've done all I can by changing my password, reporting it (not that that'll help), and by checking for trojans just in case. My question still is if I caught him mid-scam or if this money was for some reason left for me. Maybe he didn't want to steal, just pull a prank and screw me over?

No matter what we say, it's all speculation - you'll never know what the guy had in mind unless you actually find the guy. Therefore, inb4lock.

Personally I'd chalk it up to good luck in catching him - I've never heard of a hacker who just goes into accounts to have some fun without some benefit for himself. Maybe he split the cash with you as a gesture of "no hard feelings."

OMG...same exact thing happened to me. most armor was gone off my chars (primeval on my war ), most but not all weapons were gone, mule char was untouched for the most part, but the interesting thing was my sin who was lvl one (just had created him a few weeks ago) was now a perma-sin with a bunch of money... i have a feeling this is the same guy that hit us both.


Edit: if you have online banking/paypal, check it frequently. someone (might have been same guy) made a withdrawal straight from my bank account recently, i'm beginning to think it was this guy.

at least i got a permasin out of it...

very weird way of to hack an account. the first might've been that he didn't have time but the second thing by hurdle has to be intentional.

Sounds like he did it for the lulz. I approve !

Maybe he thought your chars were dressed so badly you'd need to rebuy their armors.

On a more serious note, nobody knows, so change your password before he takes all that money...

what bugs me is that this guy is smart enough to hack the account, but not smart enough to screw me over. he took most (but not all) of the armor/weaps off my chars, but didn't leave me with nothing. he hacked my bank account, but didn't drain it. He got into all my accounts, but didn't change any of the passwords. Also, he is (i'm 99% sure of this) Asian, because all my characters were in Korean districts (which i never, ever go in to) but he didn't change the actual fonts into korean, but instead changed the icons for the skills from list mode into (large font?) mode.

Still dunno how he got into my account though, that's what bothers me more than anything else, how he got my username/pword in the first place.

Maybe something came around and he couldn't finish what he was doing, its a good thing you managed to sign in when you did to maybe catch him in the middle of the act, My friend had a similar incident, a hacker got into his account only to steal the voltaic spear he just bought two weeks later he used his buddy key to tell me someones changed his password. Hes not been back since

and now i got a code 045...who do i contact for this? ncsoft support doesn't help at all

My friend was hacked (this was way before Factions) and he came back to find nothing was stolen, but in his storage was a req. 9 15>50 Fellblade.

I believe it Liam016 is spot-on. You and my friend were lucky, and managed to get your account before he finished what he was going to do.

People do NOT hack other people's account.

Brute Forcing is a concept that does NOT work too well in the GW-scene.

They can, however, hack your MSN, forum accounts or other shit, and then try the pass on your account. (Some study showed that 60% of internet users uses the same, or no more than 2 different, password(s) for ALL their internet activity. -And I'm pretty sure the REAL percentage will prolly be higher, if you were to ask EVERY internet user-)

Believe me, you can take "Brute Forcing" GW out of the equation completely.

So, you're stuck with either 2 things:

-A "friend", someone you know in-game, who knows your email u use, brute forced your guru account (Or ANY other for that matter), and used the password on your GW acount.

-Someone who saw you on a forum, went to your acount info (of Guru, or other forum), saw email adress, and thus hacked that forum acount, and applied it to the GW acount.

Either way, try and use different passes for every internet application. -You do NOT want to see my list of passwords, it's a paper glued to my desk, and it contains over 20 passes ^^-

As for the 600K, it's random, rare, but this would make option 1 (A friend hacked you) more plausible, as he merely wanted to fcuk with your mind, but not really "punish" you in any way.

I think that the reason the hacker didn't take the money was because if you went to a-net and reported that you got hacked. They would look at the days and see the transactions made. Then they would see you giving 100k+ trades for absolutely nothing in return to the hacker's account and rightfully ban him.

That is my only reason of thinking that he would leave the gold. Most likely figured he'd get banned if he took it or associated the hacked account with his in any way.

Just another reason not to play Guild Wars after drinking Vodka Poppers and smoking the rest of that doobie you found in your friend's sofa.

Also, and excellent way of establishing plausible deniability for online gold trading..."No, really, ANet look...all my stuff is gone, I have no idea where all that gold came from..."

I smell fish.

meh, don't care if i don't get armor/weaps back. they are replaceable. pain in the butt to have them gone, but replaceable.

by lots of money i mean 28k and 5 ectos

i just wanna play a bit, but to be honest i'm really not too mad at this guy. kinda annoyed i can't play right now, but i guess i'll play spore till it's all figured out. never really got rich on guild wars, so i really had nothing to lose (besides my primeval armor...that still stings )

oddly enough, he left the cuirass too, took helm, gloves, pants, and boots, but left the chest piece.

WOW, this guy did a similar thing too! My elementalist was changed to an E/A with what looked like a sf farming build, and was moved to The Tombs of the Primeval Kings. I am starting to think it really might have been the same guy, and I am going to check my paypal account, and reset the passwords to everything I have, just in case...


Well, my friends list is empty, the only people i know in game are my guild-mates/personal friends who i don't think have the knowledge nor the motivation to do this (and there there's only four of them).
Now that you mention it, this happened one week after I made my first thread (a pc over at ventari's, I usually just respond or lurk) and 1-2 days (can't be sure) after I made my first more serious thread (i.e. I actually wrote something). I bet that's how it happened.

I can understand the password part, but how would he/she have gotten my account name? It's completely separate from the e-mail account I use for guru...

I'm gonna start dedicating my stuff to HoM...that way if I get haxxored I'll at least have a few things "recorded"...

for the record.Inde stated in another hack thread(or similar) that email addresses are not viewable by members/elite gurus w/e on gw guru.at all.....ever

There is no way a hacker can see your email address or password on this forum.

I expect there's certain details not being mentioned here.

Sounds like it was a gold farming company that got in to the accounts. They probably had a bot(/poor hired asian guy) farm stuff on the permasin/ele - which is where a good chunk of the money most likely came from. The actual money in storage was (in my opinion) probably a fluke due to forgetting to change the password, catching them whilst they were still "processing" your account, or merely chalked up to "acceptable loss" so you wouldn't report the hack.

Did you by any chance sign up for anything promising, say, a GW lottery? Someone "leaving" the game who set up a website to give out his stuff? Perhaps a more shady (bot, hack, possibly even a spoof/phishing) site, that required an email address and a password to join?