The recent actions by SE to return accounts was not an admirable act by SE to help the community as much as they would like it to seem that way. The hard cold truth of the matter is that SE had well over 2500+ reported cases since early Dec.2007 to the begining of Jan.2008 (still growing btw).

Part of the hackers M.O. was to change the password and Credit Card info effectivley locking the rightful owner out and SE’s response was because the Credit Card info did not match that you could not be the righful owner…no reg codes, previous billing info only what was currently entered could be used for account validation.

So guess what happens in early Jan. when SE goes to bill…that’s right the Credit Card info is invalid…Suprise Suprise and now SE wants to get the accounts back..why? so they can bill of course. Of course the gotcha with this is you recieve back an account stripped of all currency and gear.

When pressured about doing a rollback of charcters to a date when the account was not compronmised SE stalls for weeks and then they finally announce on Jan.31 a new policy…instead of item restoration for only dropped or lost now they can restore items that were lost thru a compromised account…catch is that it has to have happened within the last seven days.

It takes at least one day to report…then the account is locked for investigation this takes anywhere from 3-5 days, you now have to make a Senior GM call to request item restoration which is a 72 hour wait normally 2 days before they respond…guess what you went passed seven days.

You want to ask questions ask the hard ones:

“Why is it that if I want to return to the game after leaving six months earlier you can restore my charcter information but you can’t do this for someone who was compromised?”

“Why can you not modify your software to tie a security question before credit card info, passwords and other sensitive information can be changed to help prevent this in the future?”

“How does SE justify having the paying customers that had their accounts moved to a different server by the hacker, ask the returning customer to pay to transfer the charcter back?”

“How does SE ask the returning customer to pay late fees for the time the account was under hacker conntrol?”

These are all tough questions….for someone who was previously hacked I would expect you would have asked them since the answers we all recieve “These are decsions being made from way up…..I don’t see it going much higher than who you spoke to