Accounts Banned for fraud, look/post here

Learn from mistakes, I highly doubt this problem will exist as with the release for GW2 will come more money and they money will go to payment for support.

My friend's 2nd account noticed one of the officers was online, he got unbanned.

Edit: just checked my email

Besides, I am sooooo hyped with Alice. This can wait

Problems always exists in games like these no matter what. Just be patient, they'll get to everyone eventually.

I haven't gotten that e-mail yet that Zodiac posted, I'm still locked out of my account personally.

i tried sending this to gaile via her user page on wiki but i dunno if i put it in the right spot. so gaile/regina who ever see this please read it. Also let me know if i should put in anymore info that can help my case.

first i would like to say sorry if this is not how you do it. I'm not sure how to contact gaile gray anyother way. I was blocked got an error 045 saying i was a gold seller/buyer. I first want to say i have never bought/sold gold with rl money. i dont even know who you can do that i cant even figure out how to use guru's auction page. My ticket number is 091102-001744. I woke up ealry today did the few normal chores and signed onto aol. I then went to guru and checked my sell thread. After checking my thread i surfed the riverside inn. after a little bit i signed onto gw. i chatted with my gl and then mapped to la.

I watched the trade chatter for awhile then i bought a tot stack for a nice price of 45k. and a few minutes later 2 dust stacks for 2.5k each. Then i spent a little while trying to and finally buying the 3 normal ele tomes i needed for my sin. By that time i saw it was getting close to 11am my time eastern time zone. I figured i should fix me and my mother lunch then do a chore before nic was found. But before i signed off i chated with my gl Pin Up Babe about the items in cof i needed for head pieces i set myself to away then went to lunch. after i think was a hour or so i came back to see i had error codeed 007. This isnt the first time i had this problems but this time i wasnt able to log back on.

It was then i discovered i had the error code 045 and why i had it. I freaked out to put it mildly. I have never done anything illegal in my life or on gw. I even have proof the last thing i bought before this was dust stacks a tot stack and 3 ele tomes! and the last thing i remember selling was a 170 cc tonics and before that a unded flowstone elemental i got on guru.

I never bought or sold gold for rl money. The way i make my money now in game is by feather running and making essences to sell in toa. last high end item i got was a chibi gwen which was a gift via zkeys from my friend Fergie who is in my allaince. Pin Up Babe my gl can vouch for me about what i did last in gw. Half is not most of my items i got were gifts from dear friends or a great find on guildwarsguru.com. The only time i sell stuff offline of gw was on guildwarsguru.com. Please i dont know what to do other then the ticket i sent it. i never done anything bad on guru and i people who can vouch for that. So please if i can do anything else or if this isnt how i contact you the right way please let me know and thank you for listening.


thanks i can only hope i get my account back with all items still intacted.

AngelWJedi your issue has nothing to do with this website. Buying and selling items on Guru is not going to get your account banned and has never gotten anyone's account banned. Unless you were unknowingly violating the EULA.

This thread though is for those who purchased items in the NCSoft store and were wrongly banned for account fraud. If you have not purchased anything through the NCSoft store, then you are describing something different then what these other users are experiencing and this is the wrong thread for it.

NCSoft support is the only one who can help you with your account.

Also update on Regina's Wiki Journal page

And from Gaile Gray

Wow. Thank you Gaile and ArenaNet - very generous. I would gladly have taken getting my account back and counted it as a win. I'll invest into some more panes I think once this is resolved

okay sorry inde i didnt know this wasnt the right thread. when i saw fraud i assumed it my cause was one of them. i am also glad using guru didnt cause it. but where should i post then? which is the right thread for me? the right place to get/give info other then the suppost page? and if they should ask mefor my keys codes how do i know its safe(right person) to give it too?

Not a problem Angel, you're going to find all the links you need right here:

http://www.guildwars.com/support/default.php

Only NCSoft support can resolve or help with your issue at this point. If they are backlogged because of these erroneous reports then you can expect it to be a few more days. Sorry.

So since both of my friends purchased Nightfall and got their accounts unfairly banned, they'll be getting Nightfall for free. Seems like fair compensation to me. Plus, one of our guild members farmed them a full stack of Trick-or-Treat bags each to help make up for the day they missed.

Now it's just a matter of getting the accounts reactivated.

It's like sitting in a hospital waiting room, hoping your character is still alive. =P

Also, AngelWJedi ... check your private messages.

My case is unusual because I was able to get a support rep on the phone who at least unlocked my accounts. That makes me very lucky indeed, and I can certainly appreciate how fortunate I am.

I will point out that at no time did I demean any support representative. On the contrary, I thanked them profusely for taking the situation with such grace, and for all their efforts on my behalf. A little kindness can go a long way.

I can imagine that they are getting a high volume of calls where the party on the other end is rather irate, especially after hours of redialing every minute or so and waiting on hold for over 30 minutes just to get through. I had no desire to be another one of those customers, and I found them to be very courteous and helpful.

To this point I haven't gotten my son's account keys reinstated, but it looks like all will be well soon.

To be fair to all those out there who have not had their accounts unlocked yet, I will refrain from logging into any of my accounts until I get that email. That's what you all have to wait through, so I'll stick it out with you.

I do have to compliment NCSoft on their efforts to make things right. Giving us what we ordered for free is certainly a lot more than you could expect from Battle.net or Blizzard. Good job, Arena.net and NCSoft.

Getting the payment fraud item for free would be sweet! I'll be able put that bday money towards something else...like a massage.

It's been over six hours since this comment and I'm going to bed now.

Hopefully everyone will have their account situated tomorrow.

Well i posted bout 10 hrs ago im still waiting for this to get straightend out....grrrrrr....im gettin withdrawl from no guildwars

I would thank the reps on the phone but not profusely because this problem shouldn't have happened the first time. This is one time when I'll have to be the annoying prick and say, "better to get it right the first time."

Hmm, I was thinking about this earlier as well...

Nice thread resurrect - isn't this during the same timeframe that literally tons of people were complaining about being hacked/hijacked?

Isn't it also the same timeframe when some contractors were hired to redo the XTH web site, which has subsequently been down ever since?

Anyone else see the connection? Need I spell it out for you?

im still waiting....Anet needts to hurry up with this

Still no reply im really starting to get pissed...from now on i dont buy thriugh ingame store...and dont buy near the weekends or holidays or releases f other games

I've been waiting close to 3 days now to get my account back from payment fraud. ;/

Nothing like playing Sega Genesis games on a emulator, while I wait for my account to get unbanned....Shining Force & Cyborg Justice ftw!

Would be nice to get the item u got for free plus something else for our trouble on this...free storage panel or something.

lol ya i bet ur having withdrawl form all this


and also

"Hi, we are Anet, we work 5 hrs a day and exspect to have this all figured out in a couple of hours." ya right


joyous customer service right

@Mr Corpser: If it's ArenaNet support dealing with this rather than NCSoft (and from Gaile's message, this could be the case)... then you realise you've posted your last few rants while A-Net's offices have been empty? It's 7:30am PST right now.

And even when they roll into the office, you may not be first in the queue. Gaile said to contact support if you haven't been reinstated by this evening (PST, I assume - so it could still be many hours to wait).

I realise you're frustrated... but you're just killing yourself. Go out, watch a movie, do something else. For several hours. And then if it's still not fixed, you need to contact support.

ido hope you guys get your accounts back. like you i am going through withdraws. on urges of my friend i told my story to gaile on her talk page and she said she would look into my problem. i can hope this means i will get my account back. *hugs everyone*

me withdraws? nahhhhh......well maybe...lol

well i currently reside in germany so guildwars is really my only source of entertainment

and yes i knew they were not in thier offics

as your western neighbour i can agnolage that GW is the germans only source of entertainment is GW.
Lckily in Holland we have pot and shrooms.

All the crazy things aside my account also has been blocked, probly cause of sharing a creditcard with my girlfriend who has 2 acoounts and a lot of expansions.
the crazy thing is that i haent been blocked at the first of november, but just today (the third).

I really hope this is fixed real quick, cause a. i cant play guildwars and b. its real bad for arenanet to have such bad commentaries about buying addons.

Even when this is fixed, im going to be very suspicious about adding anything on.

i thought, cause of having to many 100k+ things, stacks of goodies and mats that a few storagepanes would help, but most certainly ill just (if this is fixed) sell all my expensive crap, and just stack up ectos, to make sure i have enough storagespace

I'm still waiting. No emails since that last one I posted yesterday. Someone posted on here an email they got from someone named "Flip" that I still haven't gotten. It's definitely a slow process.

There are several things about this situation that are just wrong. One thing I'd like to point out that I don't think has been pointed out yet is that one of the posts said they have to modify each of the keys manually. As a former programmer, a flag is just a single bit that is set somewhere, and it's amazingly simple and easy to change it from a 1 to a 0. Even if you have to pull an entire string of bytes into a register to do it, registers work at the full speed of the cpu, so how many millions of keys could be flipped from odd to even in a single tick of the clock?

It's hard to believe that these databases can't have queries run against them that would perform the necessary arithmetic or logical modifications to the data in seconds. Seriously, if keys can be flagged in an instant, it can be reversed in the same amount of time. The worst case should be that someone has to write a query to do it, which shouldn't take more than a few minutes or they shouldn't have a job working with databases.

I don't mean to bash them, but it does seem rather ridiculous that it takes this long to undo something that was done in a matter of seconds.

I suppose they have to go through each one manually to make *really really sure* that they deserve the un-ban.

Honestly though, would it not be the more customer friendly way to do it to just just flip-of-the-switch un-ban *everyone* banned over the weekend, and then take their jolly time to manually re-ban the ones who actually did deserve a ban in the first place?

my thoughts exactly, how many actual payment frauds could there have been in the one or two days this happened. Instead of eating all the free upgrades there giving out for this taking so long, could have just unbanned everyone, still charged us. and eaten whatever fraud actually happened and re banned those people after they've gone through everything.

I'd much rather of had my account back two days ago then have to wait and get a $7 refund for the storage pane purchase that caused this all

Hey now, speak for yourself! My purchase was 4 Xunlai storage panes and 5 skill unlock packs to the tune of $79.91! I'm rather glad to get it for free!

Like they told me on the phone, I'm a very valued customer!

I spent $30 in total, but most are probably just getting 7 from a storage pane. I'd still rather of had my account back two days ago then $30 refund.

The fact our purchases are so high, only proves my point even more.. How much actual fraud could there have been compared to how much money they are going to be refunding? just un-flag all the accounts that were flagged during the problem from the in-game store and then go through to re ban actual problems.
Why should you have to sit on hold for an hour to be told your a valued customer lol, thats crap imo

I'm mostly just annoyed the only response I've actually gotten from them without having to search through wiki or on these forums, is Lance is researching the issue. Which I've found out was just a mass email they sent to everyone that is having the same problem. Never has there been an official answer from anet, ncsoft or support about what is going on. Why should we have to search through forums to find out it is being worked on to be fixed?

I'd rather of had my account than the free $10 also.

Like I said before they should be giving you more than just your money back, because I got banned with 2 days of Halloween left...now I would have to wait till next year Halloween. I think that is worth more than your money back for missing a event when the problem was on their end.

Yet another reason Why I am glad i took a few months break from Guildwars : My CRACK and replaced it with women. Better and real. Although I do miss alliance faction grinding

Not to mention the amount of people that are likely to never use the in-game store again due to this mistake, or the people who aren't posting in this forum that have officially passed their boiling point and given up on Guild Wars altogether now.

I think this might be the reason ArenaNet hasn't posted anything about this issue on the log-in announcements page. They don't want word to get out to everyone else that this kind of thing could possibly happen to them. It feels like they are trying to isolate this incident to the Guild Wars Guru forums, since it's the only well-known place we can vent and talk about it publicly.

When their accounts got banned two days ago, I will still a great supporter of ArenaNet (I'm always telling people how awesome it is that they host holiday festivities and weekend events), and I told my friends that the actual incident doesn't reflect upon ArenaNet as much as how they respond to it is going to. Well, they have responded to it terribly.

One of the people whose accounts has been terminated is my mother, and she is in her 70s. Guild Wars is the only game she plays anymore. She might not understand the full dynamic of weapon upgrades and PvP battles, but she loves waking up in the morning to sit in front of her computer and kill monsters with her giant hammer. To her, the game is more than just a liesurely way to kill time, as she probably has more hours logged into the game than most of the people on this forum, even if she's not an elite player.

If it weren't for me Googling this situation and stumbling across this very thread, she would have no idea what this situation is all about. She would simply stare at the screen informing her that her account has been permanently terminated and her heart would sink into her stomach because all of the effort she's put into the game has been lost without reason.

Absolute shame on you, ArenaNet ... for not even offering a public explanation to those affected people who don't use Guild Wars Guru.

Despite your fanboys and supporters who believe you can do no wrong, your reputation as a well-respected developer has dropped to the near bottom of the list in my book.

I am going to pass up Guild Wars 2 in favor of Star Trek Online.

Edit: I know I am going to take some flame for being the negative voice of reason now, but please keep in mind that this is my personal opinion. I am entitled to it and I somehow doubt I am the only person here who shares it.

i am on the fence about anet. part of me is mad they slammed the hammer down on me and the others without warning/proof. But i still have hope i will get my account back soon and in intact. At this point i only want my account back in tact and a sorry issued from them but the longer i wait the more i loose faith in anet. when gaile talk page on wiki worked last night she said she would look into my issue. but now its down, does she have another page i can go to?

Just making a post to state I'm also suffering from this situation. I will post when there's an update on my account status.. but it's locked out at the moment.

Well, my fiance finally got a reply wanting the last four #'s of the credit card we used as well as the name on the account in question. Hopefully they have it resolved soon, might send this information into your ticket to hopefully speed up their process of fixing it.

edit: after giving them that information both our accounts are back up with access to everything, good luck to everyone

IM STILL WAITING ITS BEEN ALMOST 24 HRS

hurry hurry

im a actionscript programmer i can write a program to edit the flag out if u want grr its taking them to long

I guess I'll take up the mantle of being first to reply directly to JohnLeonard.

First of all, like you said, it is your opinion and you are entitled to it. To take it a step further, this is a forum, so every opinion that is expressed enriches the forum as a whole, so thank you for posting it.

However, just because I'm not as unhappy with Arena.net and NCSoft as you are does not make me a "fanboy." Because I thank them "profusely" on the phone does not mean that I am enamored with them. What it does mean is that I am not taking my frustration and anger out on the poor guy who answers when I call tech support. As I stated, a little courtesy goes a long way.

While I was on the phone with them I did bring up how that error message caused a whole range of emotion ranging from panic, to confusion, to anger and even some rage mixed in there for good measure. It was extremely distressing. So they are aware now of the need to change the error message you get when you try to log in. Will they change it? That's not within the power of the tech support guys, but hopefully they will. Something much more accurate and soothing would be helpful. Something that says "Access to this account has been temporarily removed while we review it for potential payment fraud. Please send a support request to ncsoft for more detailed information, of if you believe this to be an error."

I agree with you that it definitely could have been handled better. I see no reason at all (as I stated in an earlier post and echoed by the multitudes) why they couldn't have run a query to "un-flag" all the accounts that got flagged, and then review each by hand and re-flag those that are much more likely to actually be fraud.

I also believe they should post something on GuildWars.com about what is going on, and they need to make sure it is very detailed. They need to state exactly how many accounts were affected, and how long it will take them to get it resolved. They may have a legal department that is wrangling with exactly how to word something like that as we speak, but that doesn't mean we'll ever see it. There's a lot of stuff that happens in corporations that we as the general public will never see.

I try to imagine what I would do if I were in charge of the company. I have millions of subscribers in several countries on several different continents. I have literally hundreds of crises on any given day, from servers being down for maintenance, regional weather causing network outages, legal departments wanting action on their recommendation to put out a new EULA in Korea, the HR department needing a decision on which health insurance provider to go with next year, the accounting department with some bad news about a spike in fraud in the on-line store, the marketing department with a new schedule for releasing information about GW2, and who knows what else. If this is a problem that affected less than 1000 accounts, then from the top down, it's a small problem that doesn't warrant all that much attention. You tell one of the supervisors to shift some manpower and get it resolved as quickly as you can without the legal and accounting departments taking too much of a hit for the credit card processing. You know they had to pay fees on every one of those transactions, so giving you the stuff you ordered for free actually costs them real money. To me, this is a good way to make amends. It's also more than Blizzard would have done.

You can't please all the people all the time. They're not making all the best possible moves, but they are at least moving and trying to keep the customers happy. Unfortunately, this is better than 75% of the companies out there.

So, the modus operandi of Anet has spread to NCSoft... pretty standard NON-operating procedure I guess. This is pretty bad.

You are supposed to trust a company with your credit card transactions ONLINE and they must make sure not to RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO something up.
Who is to say all the clients registered on NCSoft, that their credit card information has not been compromised?
Credit card fraud is rife on the Internet and something like this is certainly not helping.

I have thought about buying some panes, but sure as hell will not be doing it now.

On a side note, it sure is interesting to see how many people actually bought the storage panes, after the initial launch and the ruckus with quite a few threads popping up about how ridiculously priced it is.
Guess ANet is smiling all the way to the bank after all.

Since I am not an employee of ArenaNet nor NCSoft, the inner workings of their studios doesn't really interest me nor should it be my concern since I am not on their payroll. While I have no doubt that your explanation of their day-to-day crisis routine might be accurate, it cannot be used as an excuse or an explanation to the fact that someone seriously dropped the ball.

Sure, I could take the nice guy route and say, "Well, mistakes happen. No big deal as long as they get it fixed soon enough."

However, I can't bring it upon myself to take that stance seeing as how they are still going about this situation in a terrible fashion. About an hour ago, a new set of log-in announcements were posted, and there is still no mention of this incident. There is nothing informing the non-Guru victims that they haven't done anything wrong. It's as if they simply don't care that they could potentially lose a lot of customers over this one little mishap.

You seem like a nice guy, Forget. I mean you no disrespect nor do I wish to get into an uncivil argument with you. But ArenaNet and NCSoft is ****ing this one up pretty badly despite your politeness, and they're just going to have to accept the fact that some of their loyal-until-now customers are going to be pissed, regardless of any excuses or explanations no matter how supposedly valid.

Edit: I should probably point out that when I say "ArenaNet and NCSoft," I am actually refering to whichever one is responsible for this nonsense. I don't actually know which one deserves to have a finger pointed at them. In all fairness, since they both have their name on the box, they are both likely to take the heat together.

It's fixed, I can get on!

good for u at least they are working on it still

Anyone else get an email or have been unbanned yet? I still haven't gotten a response other than the one saying that they were looking into the matter from Lance.