Although many of you may be able to recognize a "fake" or "scam" e-mail that is not from a company that it 'pretends to be', senders of these types of spam letters ('fishing' for your account information or credit card information, called "Phishing") are getting better and better at it - and it is getting harder and harder to recognize these fake e-mails for many people. However, I wished to speedily created this Quick Tip, to inform others that there is another 'fake e-mail' going around very recently - but this one may actually from Blizzard Entertainment...
Above, is an example of the 'fake e-mail' [with MOAR FLAREZ], that purports to be "from Blizzard Entertainment" - one that I just received myself - and although just seeing this e-mail may immediately scare off most recipients [which is not a 'bad thing' in regards to unknown email], this one may in fact be an actual, informative, notification from Blizzard.
Many are already asking on the Official World Of Warcraft Forums if this e-mail is 'real or not', and according to a Blizzard Representative, there may indeed be some 'house cleaning' going on, for aging accounts - to be more specific, ones that do not have either any full-version (non-Trial) retail games on them, or ones that have not been utilized for a very long period of time. One such related post, by such a representative, is below:
So, there may in fact be some very old, or very unused accounts being notified recently that their accounts may be purged soon. However, since these types of e-mails are mostly [as in 96.333% and up] NOT from Blizzard and are merely "phishing" attempts at getting your account and/or credit card information, some Tips are in order [in my opinion].
Two easy tips that I can give immediately are:
- Do NOT click on any links, images, buttons or anything else interactive within the e-mail
- Instead, close/delete the email and go directly to Blizzard.com or Battle.net, by typing in the address yourself, directly into your web browser and access/update your Account from there
By simply using the above two tips, the chances of you going to any 'fake sites' or being 'scammed' is immediately reduced to a much, much lower possibility.
Of course, other measures can be taken; such as deleting the e-mail, not opening it initially (after only seeing the Subject in your Inbox) and obtaining an account Authenticator from Blizzard for your account.
Regardless of the steps you wish you take, I wanted to quickly put this up here, as this is a very recent email distribution [and one that I received myself regarding an old Trial account I had forgotten about], in order to help others...
Be careful out there, always investigate, if in doubt - and See You In The Game!
