Game Data Recovery Request (GDR) left me in Purgatory

[Lunalepsy]

I will start by stating my account was compromised, it wasn't for long and using Customer Service staff I was able to get the account locked down after about 30-40 minutes from the time it was compromised and the account was returned to me 3 days later.

This isn't why I'm writing, but just the background.

When I had the account returned, all that had been taken was my gil. I went through all my characters, bank slots, retainers etc. and as far as I can tell the only damage done to the account within that time period was them taking my gil. At a CS agents suggestion, I filled out a game data recovery form. This was on 9/24, slightly over two weeks ago. I tried contacting Square Enix's phone CS support and they have only given me the party line of "We do not place ETA's on character recovery" and to contact a GM via email for details on my case.

GMs have not been responding to their emails. To date, the only contact I have had with a GM regarding my case was an email I got asking for my Character name, Server and Job levels... All of that information was definitely available in the GDR form I was asked to fill out. When this first happened, the CS member said this process should only take a few days if it was just my gil. I didn't think to research it at the time I opened the ticket, but now I am reading posts saying this process can sometimes take months if not a year to process. Granted, many of these posts are quite old and I've had difficulty finding recent ones.

I am at a point where I am beyond caring about the gil.

I'm upset as it was not a small amount of gil taken, but I'd be far more upset if I'm unable to play at expansion release. Square rolls the character back to a certain date in time previous to your account being compromised when they do a GDR; ergo, there is no point in playing the character til the GDR is completed because it will simply have any progress eliminated when the GMs get around to the GDR. I have called the CS line and asked, if they could not give me any ETA, to simply cancel the GDR process and they said that once the form is filled out they do not cancel GDRs.

I have no idea how many previous images of a character Sqaure Enix keeps... if I just continue to play the character, will it eventually get to a point where there will be no images pre-compromization for them to use? Anyone with experience in this have any idea how long that might take?

My ideal solution would be for them to complete the GDR; however, if they can't do that previous to Endwalker then I'd rather cut my losses and play my character again.

TLDR; I cannot get an ETA on how long the my GDR will take, I cannot cancel my GDR, my character is in an unplayable state despite the fact that I have access to them again because at an arbitrary point in time they will be reset. Do I have any options here? (Don't bother with comments like add 2FA or roll a new character- they aren't constructive and are beside the point here).

Ouch. I hope it gets fixed soon!

[Ixanthe]

Honestly I can't recommend the recovery request at all.
I received a whisper in game while questing in Limsa around 11 PM Oct 17th that said there was a giveaway going on and you have to reply to a forum to sign up. I thought that sounded fishy and decided to google it to see if there were any scams like this going on. I saw a forum link that mentioned the same message and people had responded with their experience, so I went to it as it looked like a square enix forum(just like this one). It tells me to log in to view the forum, I think nothing of it because this wasn't the link sent to me, and not even a minute later my character is logged out. I tried to log back in but it said my password was incorrect. I log into discord with my guildies and they say they see me in Uldah; I knew then I had been hacked. My in-game husband happened to join us at this moment and I explain what had happened, he immediately logged in and ported to me in Uldah and saw me targeting someone named Bao Fenx. My guildies joined him and they took pictures, I changed my password and activated a token and reported everything to SE; I lost 46 million gil all told. I completed the GDR request which took a little more than a week, they rolled the game back but this left me in a worse position than before. They rolled me back to a time before I had the money and upgraded my gear. My 520 paladin and level 80 blacksmith lost their gear and melds, my 520 bard lost her melds as well as my samurai and my white mage gear was rolled back from 525 to 523. Now I have 500k and I have to rebuy my BS gear and all of the melds for my paladin, samurai and bard and get my two cryptlurker pieces my white mage had.
On top of this, a friend of a guildie also got hacked I think by the same person I did as they did go to the link and when they got their account back they saw that Bao Fenx was invited into their guild and left not long after. They were robbed of their FC money and their personal money, but the name they originally registered their account with is different from what it is now and SE won't do the request because the ID doesn't match. So beware of Bao Fenx if you see them and be sure you have your account data up to date.
But honestly, I can't recommend the GDR. I can't tell you how disheartening and defeating this whole process has been. I've now been screwed twice, once by the hacker and now by SE and all they can say is there isn't a guarantee when they do the recovery. I wish I hadn't made the request at all.