Players report that they receive e-mails that pretend to come from us. For the most part, such e-mails are phishing attempts. We want you to know a few things about them.
We will not send e-mails that state that your account will be terminated if you do not respond. We will not send emails that state that an account has been compromised (unless we are responding to a player). Emails of this type are almost certainly malicious in intent.
Updated June 2015: Customer Support does send e-mails for these three reasons:
- Your account was involved in chat violations.
- Your account was closed for botting
- Your account was closed for engaging in, or helping with, gold sales.
- Our Customer Support e-mails will never contain live links.
- Our Customer Support e-mails instead will refer you (without a link) to our Support System for assistance, so you can control accessing the ticket system.
To protect yourself from phishing attempts, please consider the following:
- For matters related to account security, access the official, secure account page by typing account.guildwars2.com. Log in through that page and secure your account.
- To see if a link is suspicious, hover over the URL and carefully review the precise details of the hidden, underlying link in your browser. If the URL in the email is different than the underlying link, DO NOT click the link.
- To be extra secure, type the URL into your browser instead of clicking a risky link. Alternately, you can copy and paste the visible link into your browser. (Take care you do not copy and use the hidden, bad link.)
- Keep in mind that we do out best to write clearly and properly. If you see grammatical errors, if you see odd phrasing, that’s a definite sign that something may be “phishy” with the email in question.
We suggest you take the following steps to make sure both your game account and your email account are secure:
- Scan your hard drive for viruses, keyloggers, and any other sort of malware, having made sure that your anti-virus software is up-to-date.
- Change the password of your game account to a complex password you haven’t used before and that you use only for this game account.
- Make sure you are using the additional email authentication for your game account. You can find further information here: https://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/9192/kw/Authenticator
- Alternatively, you can use two-factor authentication if you own a mobile device. You can find additional information about two-factor authentication here: https://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/9238/kw/Authenticator
- Change the password of your email account. You should follow similar rules for choosing your email password that you following in choosing your game account password.
- If your email provider offers any two-factor authentication or similar options, take advance of those to further strengthen the security of your email account.
Further tips about account security can be found in this article: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/tips-for-keeping-your-guild-wars-2-account-secure
And an in-depth look at security is presented in this post by ArenaNet Founder Mike O’Brien: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/mike-obrien-on-account-security/
Communications Manager
Guild & Fansite Relations; In-Game Events
ArenaNet
(edited by Gaile Gray.6029)