New Phishing Attack Targets WoW of Blizzard Entertainment

E-mails masquerading Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft (WoW), an American video game developer and a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) are currently in circulation on the air with an aim to target innocent users, as published by softpedia on December 19, 2011.

The spoofed e-mail opens with the message that "It has come to our attention that you are trying to sell your personal WoW." The subject line begins with the message "World of Warcraft - Account Management". It claims that the selling of WoW is contradictory to End User License Agreement (EULA) and Terms of Agreement. As such, through the mail, account user is informed that their account will be disabled. The employees of Blizzard Entertainment will be verifying and carrying on with the investigation process. However, it also warns the user to carry on with the verification process if the user wants their account to be safeguarded from getting suspended and disabled.

For carrying forward with the verification process, the user is required to provide all the personal information pertaining to the account name, password, name of the account holder, and also provide the answer to the secret question. It also claims that in case if the recipient ignores the message, the account will be automatically closed permanently.

The e-mail is completely fraudulent and is not being forwarded from any of the employee at Blizzard Entertainment or WoW. However, it is certain that the message is a well drafted phishing scam designed to entrap ignorant users into providing their WoW login details.

On gaining access to the phished account, the scammers can easily lock out the real user's account, steal any personal information stored there, and illegally sell the accounts also. Such details are highly in demand and can be sold at a handsome amount.

However, there exist quite significant variations in the phishing stories employed by the WoW phishing scammers. Netizens should thus remain vigilant while responding to any of the phishing e-mails. Also, it is worthy to mention that the phishing e-mails contain lots of typographical, grammatical and spelling mistakes, so if many mistakes are persists, one can be much certain about claiming a mail to be fraud.

Besides, this is not the first instance of scam targeting Blizzards. There is sufficient evidence of such e-mails in March 2011 also, when scammers released a phishing e-mail but fortunately due to suspicious activity the accounts of people were locked.

Related article: New Zealand Releases Code To Reduce Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 12/28/2011