Six days into WoW: Forever's launch, the oldest scam in the book is back. Shortly after 8 p.m. Beijing time on November 10, a player posting as Islandsteve reported on Blizzard's official Forever General Discussion forum that he had received an in-game whisper from a fake Game Master, steering him toward a website at "forever.**.con" — note the ending: .con, not .com, and the poster masked the middle of the domain himself. His warning is blunt: it is not Blizzard, it is a third-party site, and its whole purpose is to steal your account. If you are leveling on Forever right now, that whisper is one random tell away.

The thread title doubles as the alert: "The fake GM scammers are at it again." When the previous wave hit is never stated in the thread, and there is no earlier scam post in the recent forum record to date it against. What the thread does deliver, in a dozen-odd minutes flat, is a working playbook. At 20:09 Beijing time, player Chilly filed the fake GM alongside the gold-seller spam that already floods the game. At 20:10, Islandsteve asked how to report it in game, adding that this happened to him on WoW: Forever — confirming the whisper landed on the new server. At 20:11, Chilly answered: "right click name and report spam." By 20:18, Islandsteve confirmed he would do exactly that the next time one shows up.

The one reply that matters: right-click, report spam

The thread's real value is not the alarm but the path: right-click the sender's name and choose report spam. Fake GMs, gold ads and boosting spam get filed the same way — see it, report it, feed the account into the ban pipeline. As of drafting, the thread stands at 6 posts from 3 players, and not one reply comes from a Blizzard staff member.

Where did the GM nameplate come from? One player's guess

One detail nobody in the thread can answer: how the scammer passed as a GM in the first place. At 20:20, player Iapetus112 offered a theory — if the sender really carried a GM logo by their name, the only plausible explanation is an addon quietly providing a hook into the chat system; his suggestion is to identify that addon and report it so Blizzard can shut it down and get it pulled from CurseForge. That is one forum poster's speculation: no screenshot, no addon name, no response from Blizzard. Until someone produces evidence, treat it as noise, not fact.

Two old rules for spotting a fake GM

Blizzard Game Masters will never ask for your password, and they will never direct you to a website outside the game. That is Blizzard Customer Support's long-standing public guidance, and this case trips both wires: the "forever.**.con" address is an off-game lookalike site whose top-level domain was not even spelled correctly, and a real GM handles business in game rather than asking you to submit credentials to a third-party page. Build the reflex now: any out-of-game link arriving in an in-game whisper is phishing by default, especially one-letter-off domains.

Launch week is exactly when account thieves work the crowds

Why now? No mystery: the server is one week old, full of fresh accounts, everyone busy leveling, running zones and filling chat channels — high traffic, low suspicion of anyone wearing a "GM" label. Comfortable hunting conditions. Four things you can do today:

  • Do not click any out-of-game link sent to you in an in-game whisper;
  • Received a fake GM whisper? Right-click the name → report spam;
  • Never enter your Battle.net credentials on a third-party site; if you have not enabled the Blizzard Authenticator, do it today;
  • Already typed your password into one of these pages? Change the password immediately, then contact Blizzard Customer Support through the official support site after logging in.

Blizzard has said nothing about this wave — no acknowledgment, no announcement. Watch the blue posts on the official forums and the security notices on the official support site; anything that matters will come from there first.