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Comment by celdon25 | Hacker News Reader

Speak for yourself.

I had my EA account stolen once. You know what they did? Nothing. I was able to trace the culprit's real name, his e-mail address, country of origin, and ISP via an IP address (which was not provided by EA, by the way ;-)). I did not even get a response from EA's customer service, except some drone sending me a password reset, which I did not need by then.

At least Blizzard puts some effort into it. And I can, without much trouble, get a human on the phone if I call Blizzard's customer service department.

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No, they don't put any effort into this.

I can hand you my (EU) account data and you can steal my games. Play Overwatch for free, in my name. Play the SC2 extensions I bought. YAY!

Now, I as the rightful owner of that account cannot add a purchase to that account, because "regions". I cannot switch regions, because that requires that I hand in the most personal information I have (address, ID) unless we're talking nudes. It feels like nudes.

You can steal my account and use it for a lot of nonsense and enjoy the paid content. You cannot move my account into a different region. Cool. Neither can I...

It's not clever, it's not "putting effort into it", it is blatantly speaking just stupid.

I had my Blizzard/Battle.net account broken into - there was nothing to steal at the moment (I had played some multiplayer something a decade ago with one of the free multiplayer-only installations).

When I wanted to create a Hearthstone account, I found that out. The Blizzard CS reps were pretty decent, and they eventually fixed the issue (I still ended up creating a brand new account with better security since I was paying money this time).

I had the opposite happen to me with my EA account.

It was stolen and I was getting emails in Russian (I think) but I didn't care (mostly because of things they do like this post) until last year when I wanted to play BF2:BC so I contacted EA's customer service thinking there's no way I could get the account back, especially after 4-5 years. They asked a couple of questions and got my account back in about 15 minutes.

I was able to get it back without their help. But I couldn't change the security question back to my own.

I had my EA account stolen last year, and getting it back was really straightforward and pretty frictionless. You just need to pick up the phone and call them (or you can also put your phone number in a form and they will call you, so there's no waiting on hold).

Tried the form, did not receive a call. I was able to get my account back without their help. But I couldn't change the security question back to my own.

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