FYI -> codemaster ban scam : LOTRO - Discussions

from: http://www.thebrasse.com/game-comics/279#commentsplit

author: The Brasse

quote->

Yesterday, I received two emails purporting to be from Codemasters. Now, that is not all that unusual, they are the European distributor of LOTRO and we get a fair amount of traffic from their forums.

The first merely advised me that my subscription had expired. As I have a LIFETIME subscription to LOTRO and was actually in game at the time, I ignored it, meaning to look into it further later, thinking that perhaps it pertained to my account in the Codemaster forums.

The second email was the kicker.

You would think, in this day and age, with the global scammer market able to pick and choose between millions of eager young asshats wanting to make a dollar an hour, that they could find people with a reasonable grasp of the English language, or at least someone capable of copying and pasting appropriately. Like deleting phrases pertaining to the PREVIOUS game scam. Apparently not.

Here is the email in its entirety:

Greetings,

It has come to our attention that you are trying to sell/trade your personal
Lord of the Rings Online account.

As you may or may not be aware of, this conflicts with the EULA and Terms of
Agreement of Codemasters and Lord of the Rings Online.

If upon further investigation you are indeed attempting to obtain monetary
profit against the terms of the user agreement, your account can and will be
disabled. Codemasters has the right to consider legal action if necesarry,
based on the severety of the action.

If you hope to avoid account suspention you should verify your personal
possession of the account in question.

We at Blizzard Entertainment take infractions of the user agreement quite
seriously, and we must confirm the original ownership of the account.

Please Complete the information in (here they had a long and ludicrous URL
link, which I decline to reproduce)
you are the owner of the account in question.

If you ignore this mail your account can and will be closed permanently due
to suspicions of alternative ownership.

We ask that during the time of the investigation you give approximately
twenty-four hours of inactivity after sending a response email. This should
provide enough time for Codemasters to confirm your identity and that the
terms of agreement are being followed as is necesarry.

Regards,
(unsigned)



I particularly like the instructions to "give approximately twenty-four hours of inactivity after sending a response email." it should really continue, "This should provide enough time for us to change your password, clear out your bank account, sell your stuff, see if we can raid the guild bank, break things, change your password and then run away laughing."

This email contains the usual clues to an obvious scam:
- lack of embedded logos (when they DO use logos, they are usually pixillated and "off looking"
- ridiculously long URL link (not sure why this is always the case - is it to disguise themselves? One of you certified geeks should know the answer to this)
- spelling, grammatical and formatting errors (I deleted the extra line spaces that were in the original, lest it stretch on too long)
- a huge "to" address list of other folks who got the same email (no real company would ever allow you to see all the other folk's addresses)

But these guys, shining examples of Darwinism at work in the scammer milieu, also forgot to replace "Blizzard Entertainment" with some combination of "Lord of the Rings Online," "Turbine," or "Codemasters." That actually set me giggling. Darn that Blizzard, running around swallowing other games whole without telling anyone!

By the way, Codemasters itself is a completely legitimate company that handles the European distribution of Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online and a number of other games. The way scammers like to work is to take a company that you are likely to have dealings with (and trust), and try to convince you to contact them through a fraudulent link, leading you to a place where bad things happen. The linked site may attempt to record your login and password, or perhaps upload a virus or malware program. Bad. Very bad. Nothing good. No cake.

I have had similar phishing scams sent from sites that purported to be from my bank, my mortgage broker, car insurance company and other businesses that I've never had dealings with.

The sad thing is that these scammers appear to have obtained their present mailing list from our site. Now, collecting email addresses from websites and forums is a national pastime. Dozens of companies have spiders that crawl around collecting this sort of data. Hell, GOOGLE does it, and we all like and respect Google!

Most forums require an email address to be entered for verification; many people use a hotmail, yahoo or similar address precisely for that purpose. Register, watch that mail for the relevant confirmation, accept, and then ignore all the spam that can (and does) result. Set the email address to PRIVATE if you want to be sure that no one can mail you aside from the site admins.

Alternatively, you can enter a legit email, wait for the confirmation, and then go back and alter the email to gobbledygook (which works great as long as you never have to recover your password or receive email from the site. I certainly won't be offended if you give us a fake email address... I never send out bulk mails. Except maybe that "PARCHED DWARF - SEND BEER" one last fall.... but I was desperate! Just kidding, I only sent that to Wren and she merely responded by suggesting that I make some tea. TEA! I tell you... now, where was I?

A lot has been written about how to avoid being taken in by hackers and scammers, and among the best is a piece done up by then manager of EQII's Customer Service for SOE, Rich Schmelter.

Here is a link to his post, well worth reading: The Dangers of Buying Plat and/or Powerlevelling Services. ( http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/post ... _id=411660 )

So put up your own NO PHISHING sign, and watch your backs.

#
Brasse

ps. Yes, I KNOW we still have some gold seller ads here, and that they are a major cause of scams, phishing and account hacking. They come from Google Adsense, and I hate 'em as much as you do. Google is the tail end of our ad server list, and only fills in when the other companies have nothing for us. I can only filter out 200 URLs total through Google, and believe me, these guys have thousands of URLs. One day this site will be uber enough not to need Google ads to survive. Until then I apologize, repeatedly. Do like you do for Cialis ads on tv and IGNORE THEM, or better yet, give them the finger when they show up. That always makes me feel better.

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LOL cant believe they kept blizzard in there. Stupid stupid scammers.