Tale Fourteen: Hacked?!

Have your ever been hacked? Have you ever logged in game to see your poor toon stripped naked and left with 1 copper?

I haven’t but I know people who have. At the time, all I could think about was “Man, that must suck!” and I’d go my merry way.

Today, it was different. And, I suppose, it was all fate.

I’d actually been on my dwarf priest, healing people in Wintergrasp so I could hopefully do Vault of Archavon and hopefully nab some pretty loot. That didn’t happen, however. The Horde snuck by us, and touched the Orb when we were pretty confident that we’d won that round. I was annoyed but decided that since Horde had WG, I might as well find a group for my lock.

I got lucky with finding an awesome group and even luckier at getting my Deadly Leggings. “I need gems”, I thought as I ported back to Dalaran and decided to check out the guild bank to see what we were running low on and to see what I could make to fill it up.

Well, that’s when the panic began to settle in. The first tab was empty. Mind you, this is where we keep all our epic BoE gear and such. I blinked, check out the second tab. The third, fourth, fifth and sixth. All of them, empty except for things that could be considered worthless. I checked the guild money log. 1000g+ had been taken out within that same day. By the same member, on different toons.

I need to make something very clear. This member is an officer. He is one of our most trusted members. He’s close friends with Grimm, our guildmaster. And he and his significant other had just quit the game on Sunday.

Do I believe he nabbed everything before he really quit and left us high and dry? NO! Is it possible? Maybe. Do I want to believe that? NO.

I’d whispered one of his toons, earlier in the day, telling him that it was nice to see him in game still. He never replied, which struck me as odd. I whispered him again, to ask him if he’d still be raiding with us. No answer. He just kept on alting and alting and alting. This was an hour or so earlier, before I saw the guild bank. Before I realized he’d been hacked, and therefore so had we.

I went into an absolute panic. So much gold, items and farming had been done to get those items into the guild bank. Maybe it’s because my toons are always broke, but 1000+g is a BIG deal to me. I whispered a friend, telling her what was going on and she told me to hurry up, to whisper an officer. Being a Raid Leader myself, I couldn’t demote said hacked member or any of his toons. Well, I could actually demote one, but by the time he’d jumped on that toon, he’d taken everything. We demoted his significant other’s toons as well, hoping that the hacker wouldn’t try using her toon to clean us out. The officer couldn’t demoted any of the hacked toons because they were the same rank.

Let me tell you this: it’s frustrating. Those things were ours. We hadn’t all chipped in but it was still ours. I felt helpless, just watching as this toon, right in front of me in the North Dalaran Bank, stealing from us. WoW may just be a game, but you still get pissed off when someone steals a node right from under you, right? Well, I was beyond pissed off. I was hurt, felt betrayed (even though I knew it wasn’t really the person we’d gotten to know) and was so helpless.

In the end, the other officer and I took out as much as we could and sent it to the Grimm. We opened tickets to the Game Masters. I even jumped on my Alliance toon, thinking that maybe by now; he’d gone through the whole neutral auction house route and put them up on the Alliance AH. Nothing. I seriously even went to Gadgetztan, thinking that I could catch them in action. Again, nothing.
As I’m writing this, I still don’t know if we’ve gotten our stuff back. Has said toon(s) been kicked from the guild? Did Grimm get my 2 in game mails, apologizing for not noticing that something was amiss earlier? Has a Game Master been nice enough to hear my plea?

Please, someone educate my naïve mind. What’s the point of hacking someone? Who does it!? I mean, you’re going to get caught. The gold will be taken away and your account banned. That’s how it goes, right?

Right?....