We can’t trust them you know.

A long time ago I played World of Warcraft for a few months. I played the original content and picked up the Burning Crusades (so I could play one of those purple alien looking things, a race beginning with a ‘D’ if I remember correctly) anyway, I did not fall in love with the game and after two months of so I left the game, returning only once on a reactivation scroll for 10 days, again it never stuck with me.

So, you can imagine my surprise over the last few weeks when I receive e-mails from blizzard regarding my account and how I am selling it to another user. I am a pretty paranoid user so I ignored the mails but after receiving more and more I have gone to the Blizzard web site and obtained a contact E-mail address from there. I have then written short e-mail confirming that I have not made any action on my account since changing to a battlenet IT mast march.

The response thanked me for contacting them and then went on to say that people where trying to steal my long dormant account and the e-mails even if clearly showing a blizzard e-mail address could not be trusted. Even if the mails had the names of blizzard employees at the bottom, even if they looked in every way like a blizzard e-mail with nothing strange about them they should not be trusted.

I rubbed my chin and wondered how regular users of the service manage to tell the difference. I am an experienced and paranoid user with more security than some banks (Barclays, I am looking at you!) but even I could not tell the difference between this official e-mail land the spoof one I had received last week.

This makes me worry. If in the future there is a blizzard MMO that I DO want to play can I trust that my credit card details are really safe? Can I play Star Craft 2 without getting my account stolen?

Is it just too much of a risk to try and play blizzard games? I can see that the naughty people who generate these scams target WoW because they have a higher chance of getting a ‘hit’ because most gamers have at some point created a WoW account but this is far too rampant that even Blizzard can not find a way to show you the difference. Pretty soon I will start getting WoW scams by post through my letter box?