Call of Duty fans are the next in line after Destiny 2 players to voice their displeasure over unfair bans. In a recent Reddit post, a player explained how they were banned from the game after a hacker gained access to their account and received no support.
Cheating has been a huge problem in gaming communities, and COD is no exception—and with the use of the banhammer comes the possibility of innocents getting caught in the crossfire. OP attempted to seek help from fellow players, but the results weren’t what they expected.
Call of Duty Player Hacked, Banned for Cheating
Modern Warfare 3 player mickey_33 recently posted on the COD subreddit asking for help. They wrote:
I purchased [MW3] from the Battle.net launcher and only used that to open the game, this whole time I thought that meant I was using the Blizzard authenticator for all my games. Fast forward to this week, I got an email stating “at 2024-02-21 01:56, [my] STEAM account with the username kacani1484 (not me) was linked from my Call of Duty account.”
OP immediately unlinked the mysterious account after a few hours and was able to log in to the game, but couldn’t connect to any matches and eventually gave up.
They assumed that their account was shadow-banned and left it at that. The next day, they received an e-mail stating they were permanently banned. After appealing the decision, they were told by support that the ban would not be reversed as the account was found using cheat software and manipulating game data.
They concluded the post by expressing their disappointment, exclaiming they’ve been a loyal customer since the release of Vanilla World of Warcraft and the first COD title:
With the merger of Activation and Blizzard, this should have never been allowed with 2FA enabled on Blizzard and never use the Call of Duty log-in.
The responses they received were probably not what they wanted to hear, unfortunately.
Player Faces Tough Lesson on Third-Party Launchers
Many replies to the post explained that merely activating 2FA on the Blizzard authenticator would only work for the Blizzard account—protections wouldn’t extend to the COD account.
When a reply stated that enabling 2FA on the e-mail used would’ve prevented this scenario, OP replied saying that e-mail wasn’t a factor in this:
They were able to do this solely on Call of Duty’s website which I haven’t used in years and never updated the password.
As OP played through the Blizzard launcher, they weren’t in the know that their COD account could be hacked through the official website login. If you’re a player who accesses the game similarly, you might want to update your login credentials and 2FA for your e-mail and COD account.
Have you ever lost an account to hacking? Share your story with us in the comments below!
