Bans + Lowerping or WoWTunnels (pingzapper) = ban?

[kontarsh]

According to forum posts blizzard fucked something up, if you are using a tunnels program with a bot and have been banned please reply to this thread.

 

[Ezaum]

I have not botted while using those but I did a get an account closure notice when using WoWTunnels. So in case this helps I'll add it. This would have been a couple months ago.

I have 2 accounts on different bnets both in my name and was using wowtunnels - testing it to see if it helped. In the past without thinking about it I had moved gold between my two bnet accounts and never had an issue nor given much thought to it. When I say moved gold between them I mean via the trade window for the most because mailing between 2 accounts that aren't under the same bnet is slow. I had also traded goods back and forth.

This leads up to a night where I conducted some of my usual activities. I think I was transferring items between my accounts too but I traded myself some gold for sure. Something in the $80K - $100k range I believe. I also had around 200 auctions up but this was nothing unusual per se as I use both accounts for auctions.

Within 2-3 days I received two identical "World of Warcraft -- Account Closure Notification -- Exploitative Activity Found." I filed a ticket and called. The customer service rep was dead certain my account had been hacked although as I was able to pry some of the details out of him I could tell he had no idea what he was talking about and was likely going off a script that said if A happens then it was caused by B. He lacked the ability to think for himself when presented with facts but I digress.

I got both closures reversed. I also spoke to a GM in game who was nice and very helpful because I was missing all of the auctions I had up at the time and they needed to be restored. We had a nice chat. This summarizes the issue:

"As we discussed, you can sometimes run into these types of account issues when using Proxy/Lowerping/WoWTunnel types of services."

Basically between the phone call I made and GM I spoke to in game they flag the IP addresses as suspect as gold sellers and hackers use them a lot. They wouldn't exactly come out and say it specifically but you run a higher risk when using IP's associated with those services then you otherwise would. They also can't prevent you from using them but they discourage it and prefer that you don't.