Aion players: Watch your e-mails for scams

Keeping your password for your favorite game safe is always a top priority. No one wants to have their accounts hacked or have their passwords lost to someone who's willing to sell all of their items for gold, kinah, or what have you.

So today, as a friendly public service announcement, we here at Massively would like to remind you to make sure you double and triple check any correspondence that looks like it comes from NCsoft or your favorite game company. Today we've received an e-mail telling us that our Aion account password had been changed, and if it wasn't us that we needed to go to the NCsoft master account site and change it back.

We can guarantee you that the link provided was not for NCsoft's account management, but a phishing scam. While the scam letter was pretty obvious, always be wary of e-mails you don't anticipate. If you think there's something wrong, don't click any links in the e-mail -- instead go to your account management website directly to check on your account.

Reader Comments (13)

this one almost nailed me...I'll admit I clicked the link! check out the screenshot...the sender looks very legit if you don't look carefully. ALWAYS check the URL of the site your taken to. The link itself (the url) looks legit, but is masked and takes you to a phishing site, you think its support so just out of habit you put in your info. all of a sudden...bam - your nailed.

Be ware!

Screenshot: http://www.aionftw.com/ncsoft-fake.jpg

Aye, in the same boat at Simon. THis one ALMOST caught me today. Firefox has this site reported already for Web Forgery. I forwarded the email to NCSoft for S and Gs. I figure they could use the help, they seem pretty overwhelmed recently lol.

Is it just me or is every phishing attempt full of third grade grammar?
" .... If you not make the change, please contact support. ... "

That's what usually keeps me from falling to these stuff :\

Oh and the obviously fake links LOL

well if you follow the Korean PlayNC Twitter feed, this level of English is pretty normal!

I got one of these a few days ago, only mine had better grammar :-/

Screenshot: http://theintersect.org/images/aionscam.jpg

As you can see Gmail would have culled this if I didn't have a filter that stops everything being sent to spam*, and it detects that it's a fraud anyway. And if that wasn't enough ... I don't even *have* an Aion account.

* This email address never, ever got spam up until about a month ago and now I'm bombarded with WoW and other MMO account scams almost daily. It's weird.

I have had emails like this for the last couple of years now & they are getting harder & harder to spot as being fakes, early on the spelling mistakes & poor grammar gave them away but not so recently.

This latest one is extremely easy to be taken in by it's that well put together, I have a "link scanner" in my email software that detects the real address of links in emails, but since I don't even have an Aion account I knew immediately this was a phishing scam anyay, I forwarded it to ncsoft to alert them, as I do with any phishing stuff for games.

These things are a real threat & I think games companies need to take steps to deal with the threat better.

Thx to that phishing mail i checked my account and found out that my NCSoft Master Account got hacked. Last time i logged in was almost a month ago to cancel Aion.
My comp is save and i stay away from third party stuff and shady sites.
When i read other recent news about NCSoft it seems they had or still have a bad security problem.

Part of the problem is it is believed one of the major Aion fan sites like Aionsource may have been compromised, and emails and passwords were potentially stolen, which is why people who don't play Aion are getting these emails, because they have been signed up for a fan site in the past. It's scary to think about how they are getting this information, I can't believe I haven't seen any World of Warcraft fakes recently, for whatever reason NCSoft is the big target.

been hit with a few scams like that but I always look at the link before I click it and regardless what it says ........ when it tries to direct you to some insane web address, usually with the company title appended somewhere so it looks psudo official.

while the hyperlink itself will often say something like (https://www.trustedcompany.com/logoin) It will often actually be something like (company-title.freewebsightprovider.randomdomain/insert-giberish) when you look at the properties of the hyperlink.

So solid advice on never clicking on the links in suspect email.... and suspect email is anything you didn't request.

for clarification on "being hit" meaning I have gotten some ruse email that has cleverly attempted (and failed) to trick me =P

I'm getting these at least twice a week and I'm not even playing aion -_-

Wow, I got 2 of the in the past week, I just read my email today, and I noticed it seemed really scammy, but the fact it uses the real NCsoft support email is what stopped me. The U.R.L. makes it plainly obvious that it isn't real though. I do not know of anyway you can buy the same web address as someone else, but considering it is just words and not how the computer truly reads it, it might be possible (very unlikely), but extremely difficult, if possible, to get the same address as someone else. IP addresses on the other hand would be impossible to replicate.

Actually, they gave me the exact same IP address that "changed" yours. Also they always tell you what they change it to not give you your IP address and say "If you not make the change,"

Aion players: Watch your e-mails for scams

Reader Comments (13)

Posted: Jan 28th 2010 11:47PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jan 28th 2010 11:52PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jan 29th 2010 12:16AM Pewpdaddy said

Posted: Jan 29th 2010 1:41AM HackJack said

Posted: Jan 29th 2010 9:36AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jan 29th 2010 2:17AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jan 29th 2010 7:26AM SkuzBukit said

Posted: Jan 29th 2010 6:01AM Wieland said

Posted: Jan 29th 2010 8:52AM Dandmcd said

Posted: Jan 29th 2010 10:24AM Scuffles said

Posted: Jan 29th 2010 10:28AM Scuffles said

Posted: Jan 29th 2010 12:08PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 5th 2010 2:33PM (Unverified) said

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