Hacked / Account Suspended / No ETA

And what did your husband learn from this fiasco?

Most people should learn 1 simple rule from their first time being compromised in an MMO, and that is to NOT click the links you see in chat getting spammed all day. Yes, despite what your husband told you, or you may think, that is what happened, that is how he was compromised (Not hacked), he is the one who willingly went to the website, which caused this, not you, not anyone else, him.

It has absolutely nothing to do with SE "Security". He could have bought an authenticator/one time password if he wanted more security.

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Originally Posted by Cirsce

@Dorin My husbands password was between 10-20 and used lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and symbols. Now it's 30 characters, not that he can use it.

@Abraxis Yeah, it doesn't look like anyone is hearing back about anything anytime soon.

I've read somewhere that in the event that your account is suspended you were just supposed to have to reset your password and it would unlock. However, we have not gotten an email back from SE acknowledging that hacking or suspension even occurred to his account.

It also looks like people waiting to get their items and gil back who did get hacked, but thankfully not suspended (yet) are living in a dream world. Since some have been waiting for over a week for a roll back and then finally just deciding to play and stop waiting.

We decided against buying another copy for him to play on since this is not an isolated incident and the most common post on the forums is hack / suspension / banned for getting hacked. And other issues like them telling people they never received their 90 day subscription even though it was taken out of their bank. We both want to see how it all plays out before sinking more money into a game that seems to suffer from customer support incompetency.

I almost feel like this was how they handled their servers being overwhelmed. Completely shut down sales for two weeks with no word when it'll be back / completely suspend anyone with suspicious activity and give no word when it'll be back up. I am really in love with the game itself, but between billing errors, hacking and suspensions and generally just no word from anyone who can actually fix a problem even after waiting 2-5 hours for customer support it seems like it's just a matter of time before something goes wrong for one of us, again. And the account you've poured so much time and effort into is taken away with them giving no word to you on what's happening or when something even will happen.

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What I have bolded is in fact a true statement, it says it on the support forum website in the steps if your account has been compromised. Quote with link source "B) Follow steps for a normal password change
If for some reason the automated email does not reach your inbox, or if you accidentally deleted the email, please follow the steps for changing your password through the URL below. The login restriction will be removed once you change your password.

* Change Password *insert reset link"

source: https://support.na.square-enix.com/f...1&c=58&sc=348&

all in all, the claim is total BS and a fraud cause clearly resetting your password isn't unlocking the account as described which is sad because if it actually did what they claimed, it would save a lot of people a lot of headaches and save them a larger customer base. It was my girlfriends account that got hacked and she never received an email or any sort of communication from Square Enix. The way she found out was when she went to try and log in she got the message "you could not log in because the service account in question is not registered. If you would like to log into the service, please log into the square enix account management system and register the service account" at which point we went to mogstation and logged in and found a character she never created on a server we dont play on and at the top it saying "this service account has been suspended. Then we went to the support forums and she followed the steps from the source i linked above and changed her password, yet, still nothing.

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Originally Posted by JowyAvilon

... at which point we went to mogstation and logged in and found a character she never created on a server we dont play on and at the top it saying "this service account has been suspended. Then we went to the support forums and she followed the steps from the source i linked above and changed her password, yet, still nothing.

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Good luck. I reached that point 11 days ago and have had no response yet. I fear if I contact them again, they'll just reset my place in line for 'investigation'.

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Originally Posted by tort

And what did your husband learn from this fiasco?

Most people should learn 1 simple rule from their first time being compromised in an MMO, and that is to NOT click the links you see in chat getting spammed all day. Yes, despite what your husband told you, or you may think, that is what happened, that is how he was compromised (Not hacked), he is the one who willingly went to the website, which caused this, not you, not anyone else, him.

It has absolutely nothing to do with SE "Security". He could have bought an authenticator/one time password if he wanted more security.

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Stop just assuming that's the case. That's not the case in mine, and I'm sure nearly all of the other cases listed within this thread. I don't know exactly how our accounts got compromised, but it is NOT due to usage or visitation to any goldselling site.

And beside that point; regardless of how the accounts got compromised, SE's response time on this is atrocious.

IP Addresses are easy to mask these days. Proxies are so widely used now a days. Even if you yourself don't use it, your ISP might have one on their routers somewhere. Even if you work for that company, once it hits a router that is not owned by that company, it might have a proxy on that. Meaning an IP address is no longer a way to track things for sure. That being said, SE has actually offered several ways to make sure your account stays safe. There's the special one-time password that's available through your cell phone text messaging. With text messages usually being free to $0.50 USD at most, it's not a huge amount you'll be spending to keep your account safe. I'm not completely sure how this works but it doesn't cost that much and as far as I know, everyone that's used this method for sure (meaning I know them personally outside of FFXIV) has yet to have their account get hacked.

PS: I changed my password recently and I received an message about it right away on my own. If I didn't make that change, a simple click would've solved all my problems. The features are there and there are free and/or cheap alternatives. Please use them before your own account gets hacked too. And please, please, please don't click on those links that people spam. Let SE do that instead.

Either way, I think we can all at least agree on the fact that Square Enix's customer service is well below poor on this issue over all.