Hacked. Banned. Zero aid from GGG.

Hi everyone,

I guess I don't have much to gain personally in making this post since GGG doesn't seem to care at all, but I think it's important as a consumer to be more vocal about these things to promote change or at least awareness.

I held the company in high regard because of their approach on improving the game through player feedback and dialogue, but their actual customer support - for me and for many others, as seen on countless other posts - goes hard on the complete opposite direction.

It actually makes me want to distance myself from anything PoE related - which is really sad, because I had high hopes for this game and planned to keep playing for many years to come.

I bought the Faridun pack through Steam on December/24 and played 700+ hours until I stopped at around April, mostly because I didn't have much free time for the rest of the year.

Unfortunately, one of my passwords got leaked by the end of June and I had to recover and reset the password for my Steam account, among a few others.

I believed my GGG account would be protected since it's linked to my Steam account and that was the only method I ever used to login.

To my surprise, when I tried to login a couple days ago after so many months away, I discovered that my account was permanently banned.

Upon investigation I realized that the hacker had registered an e-mail as primary login option for the GGG account, bypassing the Steam login method.

I immediately wrote an e-mail to GGG support explaining everything in detail with screenshots and making myself available to prove I'm the real owner and that the actions that motivated the banning came from a hacker.

A few minutes later I noticed the "Ban Appeal" button and proceeded to summarize everything important I had to say within the ridiculous 500 characters limit. There is also no way to add screenshots or files of any kind.

About one hour later I got a template message that completely disregarded everything I said and merely reafirmed the reason I got banned (something generic like breaking rule "x", which included a lot of possible activities) and that the decision is permanent and cannot be contested as any attempt to do so would be ignored by their department. It also encouraged me to create a new account if I wanted to get back to playing.

That's already a terribly lazy way of dealing with the problem, since there was literally no attempt to investigate or request any information or documentation. It also meant I would lose previous characters, progress and cosmetics acquired through drops and such.

I didn't insist on the matter because I was tired of all the expected headache I had gone through while dealing with the leak and I just wanted to get back to playing without losing what I had PAID for.

So I explained my situation to GGG support via e-mail and asked to unlink my previous account so I can create a new one. I also asked how to re-enable the early access pack bought on Steam. GGG unlinked the account but completely ignored my questions.

I then created a new GGG account through Steam but that alone wasn't enough to enable early access.

Once again I explained my situation to GGG support and sent screenshots of the purchase recepit, Steam library dashboard, etc.

GGG responded that the purchase is tied to the banned account and that I would have to buy early access again. The person who was supposed to be helping me also took the opportunity to imply that I was trying to use the brazilian Steam store in a fraudulent way and that more actions could be taken against my account.

I explained I live in Brazil, which is why I use the brazilian store pages, and just happen to speak english and prefer it for gaming and some apps.

I repeated the details of how I was hacked and how there was no attempt by GGG to investigate, dialogue or even clarify anything and also questioned if punishing players that were hacked with buying the game a second time was the intended experience for GGG customers in these situations.

The reply merely stated that there is nothing they can do to help me and that if I don't want to buy the early access again I should wait for free to play access when it launches officialy. It also implied again that I shouldn't be using a VPN to buy from brazilian stores, threatening me once more with further actions against my account.

Literally nothing that I've stated makes any mention of using VPN to make purchases. I don't even use VPN for anything.

Actually, my IP address and login data could've been used to differentiate unusual and suspicious activity from regular activities and provide real customer support, but it's just easier to charge me a new game than to actually solve the problem.

So yeah, I guess I'm never playing POE again as there is nothing more I can do against such authoritarian decision.

Thanks GGG

Damn bro, sorry to hear that. It's crazy that you get a ban, but there's rmt bots spamming global all day and they don't do anything about that.

Hmmm... Wonder why they dont ban the bots... 🤔

ggg didn't care when lot of players asked about more steps of authentication security years ago, so yeah, ur situation sucks if that true. But what bothers me more, it's way of fighting with rmt, cause ggg balance it in negative side for players just to keep these addictive gambles in game like headhunter unique, etc which make player a god like and what attracts casual n^obs with money, rmt sites are open source and found in 30 secs, just to explore how this works. These bots, which were spread too much in trades since ~2021, party abusers like some streamer which was literally leaving leagues when these party abuse was nerfed and he couldn't double corrupt 100 headhunters on 1-2nd week of league out of boredom, etc, etc....

There would be far fewer problems if it wasn't rmt, but obviouslt it's "escape from tarkov" situation, where bsg company didn't fully fight with cheaters just for money from extra packs