PTCGO Breach in Security and Stolen Items

The Binder Guy

The Binder Guy

Aspiring Trainer
Member
For those of you who haven't been paying attention to recent happenings in the TCGO it appears that the TCGO's security has been compromised and that some accounts have had their cards stolen.

To put it simply, someone managed to enter people's accounts and set up unauthorized private trades between their accounts and his account consisting of several Ultra-Rares, promos, and packs in exchange for a single throwaway card. There are many theories as to how he did this but the most logical one, given the how broad the affected accounts are (people who Android devices, PCs, and Mac computers have all reported that items were stolen), is that the breach is on TPCi's end.
  • Has my account been affected? How can I tell if it has?
The best way to tell if you've been affected is if you've already had items stolen. Check your trade history to see if this has happened to you.
  • Help! Items were stolen from my account! What can I do to get them back?
Sadly, there's not much that can be done other than starting from scratch. You can file a support ticket with TPCi but the best they'll do is give you 20 trade-locked packs as compensation, they CANNOT reverse the trades.
  • My account wasn't hit, but I'm scared about this. What can I do to protect my items?
Do what most people would do in the case of a data breach, change your password to a more secure one. Switching your TCGO settings to Custom and set all trade options to Closed (Setting them to limited may also help, but it's better to be safe than sorry).

And with that said, what do you guys think of this?

EDIT: One thing that I should also mention is that the TCGO staff is surprisingly quiet about this and no one is happy about it.
 
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Huh.

The thing is, given the nature of the PTCGO, even if they can't "reverse" a trade, all they should have to do is credit your account with a replacement card. Plus, there should be a trail to follow unless this was done for "teh lols" and all the recipient accounts are dummies that dead end. Even if this alleged hacker has a bunch of fake accounts, if the PTCGO has decent record keeping, it should be possible to follow through to the end... at least, eventually.
 
Well, TPCi doesn't seem interested in helping people fix the damage done to their accounts with everyone getting the standard responses that customer service gives. It's sad this has happened but it is very sad that TPCi isn't willing to address this.
 
Well it seems that the TCGO staff has finally addressed the issue... Only in a way makes the victims look like fools and is ticking off more people. I've included a screenshot of the post in question below.
Otaku said:
Huh.

The thing is, given the nature of the PTCGO, even if they can't "reverse" a trade, all they should have to do is credit your account with a replacement card. Plus, there should be a trail to follow unless this was done for "teh lols" and all the recipient accounts are dummies that dead end. Even if this alleged hacker has a bunch of fake accounts, if the PTCGO has decent record keeping, it should be possible to follow through to the end... at least, eventually.
Click to expand...

I have to agree with crystal_pidgeot here, TPCi's customer service is atrocius. It's just that the TCGO staff seems to be a concentrated form of that atrociousness.
 

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Why can't they reverse a trade? You said before that they can give someone 20 packs, so they should be able to return the cards...
 
I don't play this game but Pokemon doesn't seem to care about hackers in any of their games. Some of the top VGC players might be hackers, and now their response to this.... It can only get worse unless they decide to do something.
 
Anime Psyclone said:
I don't play this game but Pokemon doesn't seem to care about hackers in any of their games. Some of the top VGC players might be hackers, and now their response to this.... It can only get worse unless they decide to do something.
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Well the top players are hackers but they don't cheat with anything that can't be obtained normally their just to lazy to breed and reset for them
 
Still hacking though. Plus, I didn't mention that Pokemon didn't bother to even try to stop the Gen 7 data-mining twice.
 
jessalakasam said:
Why can't they reverse a trade? You said before that they can give someone 20 packs, so they should be able to return the cards...
Click to expand...
Because that would mean going through each affected user, adding the stolen cards back to their account, and removing the stolen card from thief's account. There's also the issue of said thief accounts just being a base account that sends the stolen cards to several middleman accounts that make the trail that much harder to follow.
 
The Binder Guy said:
Because that would mean going through each affected user, adding the stolen cards back to their account, and removing the stolen card from thief's account. There's also the issue of said thief accounts just being a base account that sends the stolen cards to several middleman accounts that make the trail that much harder to follow.
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They could at least add the cards back instead of just ignoring it. That's a step up.
 
There's also the fact you can trade things other than cards. It would get messy if things like packs were involved, since it's plausible for a pack to be traded, then opened, which complicates it much further, and making exceptions for card-only trades makes it more confusing. It's mostly the fact it would be very time-consuming to do this, especially on a large scale, though.
 
Password changed. Dealing with this sounds like waaaay too much of a PITA.
 
I personally knwo how easy it is to steal cards, because my brother has an account and we decided just to move all the cards form my account to his account, and I just made an autohotkey script to trade all my cards with him, I think it took a entirety of 3o minutes or so to trade everything.

If they just want the secret rares and such, it could go much faster.
 
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