hushed up

The video game World of Warcraft has been very popular. Blizzard -- the company which owns it -- has enormous problems with "account theft" where third parties obtain a user's email address and password and log into the game. This is frustrating for the user, who may find their much loved characters stripped of their belongings, or deleted altogether, and it's bad for the economy of the wider game. So Blizzard spend a fortune trying to educate users to avoid the problem, and developing countermeasures.

There are a large number of third party web sites either providing a service related to the game, or providing news and discussion forums. As with most such sites on any topic, they have their own user database, with email addresses in it, but they don't reveal their users' addresses to the public.

I signed up for a LOT of these sites, including some of the most famous and well respected. Each time I used a unique and unlikely-looking email address, one which never receives spam etc. Typically within a few weeks, and never more than a month, these previously never contacted addresses begin receiving very carefully tailored phishing emails, targetting World of Warcraft login credentials.

Each time this happened, I used the "feedback" forms, and forums to explain what's happened, and ask for an explanation. I have never received even the courtesy of acknowledging my comment. Where the complaint itself is public, it is usually deleted.

Are all these sites being "broken into"? Or do their administrators cheerfully hand over contact details about users to criminal "businessmen" for a slice of the profit? I don't know. But either way, nobody wants to talk about it or have it be talked about.