Beware of Phishers

This is a quick note from me, Brian Buckley, the humble webmaster - er, webservant - who helps Lord Sargeras manage his blog.

Today I got the following e-mail:

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SUBJECT: Blizzard Account Administration - Account Notification
FROM: noreply@blizzard.com

Greetings,

An investigation of your World of Warcraft account has found strong evidence that the account in question is being sold or traded. As you may not be aware of, this conflicts with Blizzard's EULA under section 4 Paragraph B which can be found here:
WoW -> Legal -> End User License Agreement
and Section 8 of the Terms of Use found here:
WoW -> Legal -> Terms of Use

The investigation will be continued by Blizzard administration to determine the action to be taken against your account. If your account is found violating the EULA and Terms of Use, your account can, and will be suspended/closed/or terminated.
In order to keep this from occurring, you should immediately verify that you are the original owner of the account.

To verify your identity please visit the following webpage:
[URL removed]

Only Account Administration will be able to assist with account retrieval issues.

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter, and your continued interest in World of Warcraft.


Sincerely,

Account Administration
Blizzard Entertainment

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I'm sure most of you are well aware of the tactic of phishing, but this is just a reminder to be vigilant. This e-mail looks fairly official, appears to have a blizzard.com e-mail address, and links to actual pages on http://www.worldofwarcraft.com.

There are at least two big tipoffs that it's fake. First (and most obviously) they are asking you to verify your account. Why would Blizzard need to verify your account? Didn't they send you the e-mail in the first place?

The second tipoff was that when I followed the verification link, although the page looked very official, I could see from the URL that it was hosted by Freehostia, a free web hosting service (something Blizzard would obviously never do). I've already contacted Freehostia and hopefully they'll have it shut down in a few hours.

Of course, for me, there was a third and even bigger tipoff. I don't actually have a World of Warcraft account. :-P

Anyway, I'm sure most of you are too savvy to fall for a trick like this, but I just thought I'd post this reminder to everyone. Keep your eyes open!