Account Hijack questionFollow

NOTICE! Turn my tragedy to your benefit, Sirenites! I am holding a raffle for my gil, over 594,000 of it, and possibly some items! Check this thread in the Siren forum here: http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=57;mid=1239345945149053359;num=0;page=1

Disclaimer: I am not selling gil or asking for anything in exchange. This is a charity to a random lucky player of Siren. I am making this raffle by this rule in section VII.C of the Allakhazam Forum Rules: * Can I give someone, out of the goodness of my heart with absolutely no strings or conditions attached my spiffy sword thingy of doom on this site? YES

Edit: Seriously? Rate-downs with no answers? I don't care about my karma, but I mean come on... If you're not even going to answer, why bother?

I do not mean to incite anyone's wrath by this, and if it's not appropriate for this particular forum or if it's been asked to death before, I would appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction and I apologize in advance for bringing this up here. This was just one place I thought to turn where someone might have an answer since this just happened and I can't call SE until office hours tomorrow.

So I quit FFXI and deactivated my Content IDs (but not POL) back in December. I had it set up so that POL automatically had my password entered, so I only had to press a button to log in. (Actually, I think I had it set to where I just automatically logged in when I started POL).

Anyway, I'm on MSN when an old friend from XI who still plays asks if I came back. I say no, of course. She says that I'm on and it shows that I'm on Siren (My last server was Fairy and I have *never* had a character on Siren; I've only been on Phoenix, Shiva, Titan and Fairy). So I log in, and, oddly enough, it just lets me log on. She says it then shows that I logged off on her friend list. So apparently whoever hijacked my account didn't bother to change my password.

Furthermore, it took me a good five to ten minutes to change my password after logging back in. So obviously the person did not attempt to log back in immediately after I forced them to log off. I thought maybe they were bazaaring or something, but Caes (my main) was in his MH and Elle (my other) was in North Gusta, Lvl. 10 SCH like I left her (I wish I could've gotten AF...) Anyway, they seem just as I let them. I can't remember whether I still had the millions in gil my friend gave me from quitting, or if I had given it away. But Caes has 13k on him.. And pretty much all the same stuff as far as I can remember. If they took his gil (assuming I maybe did have a lot left), why leave 13k? And if not, why bother to take the account and just transfer worlds but do nothing?

They took the account and reactivate IDs on April 5 (though sometimes it says April 6). I just found this out today, April 9.

So as the evidence stands, they reactivated my main ($12.95 or whatever charge), my second ($1.00 charge) and got a world transfer to Siren ($25.00 charge). The credit card on file is my current card, but I know charges aren't assessed until the end of the month. For that matter, my bank account does not show any of those charges at the moment.

My questions are: (1.) Do they charge the CC you have on file automatically? I forgot how it works, and I don't want to accidentally charge myself another $12.95 just toying around to see how it works. If so, that is a very bad security decision >< But I guess I never thought about that before.

(2.) Has this happened to anyone else? Is this even RMT-like? I figure RMT would've cleaned my charas out the first day. But who would do this? Why wouldn't they change the PW first thing? Why reactivate and do a world transfer but do *NOTHING* (as far as I can tell) with the characters? I don't even think they so much as *moved* my characters an inch. I'm pretty sure N. Gusta is prolly where I left Elle and the MH in Aht Urgan is a good place where I prolly left Caes.

Okay so that's a lot of questions as my question 2, but I'm just utterly baffled by all of this. I'm too stunned to even be angry. I tried a GM call, but that was prolly stupid on my part. He was nice and directed me to Information for help, but they're closed for the night.

Anyway, if this has happened to anyone before, do you know about the credit card issues? Is SE prone to dropping the charges or doing anything to help someone in this situation? Again, I know this has prolly been beaten to death in the past, but when you're not in that situation it's hard to pay attention to the nitty-gritty details. And I don't have Premium activate now so I can't search. Or at least I don't think I do. Thanks in advance for any help!

Edit: *sheepish* Okay, so it wasn't millions and billions in gil... XD It was 500k... and I just discovered (messing around on Elle since I have the account for a month anyway) that the 500k is still on her...

What the hell just happened to my account? O_o

Edited, Apr 10th 2009 12:47am by Caes

Edited, Apr 10th 2009 1:48am by Caes

Edited, Apr 10th 2009 1:48am by Caes

Edited, Apr 10th 2009 1:50am by Caes

Edited, Apr 10th 2009 1:51am by Caes

The first thing comes to my mind is dream walking...
I remember there was a news about a woman logging into her MSN to chat with her friend when she was actually asleep.
But then you said your friend told you that you were online. Um...

Edited, Apr 10th 2009 7:27am by AretasMana

Sorry to hear about your case, Caes, sure hope you did think things over and found that you wanna keep playing FFXI. But, in case you are very sure you want to quit, I already posted back on your thread in the Siren forums.