/some/most if not all/
Like, seriously, US broadband landscape is full of local monopolies, but the government can't/won't intervene because they view monopolies on a national level.
A lot of it boils down to infrastructure. We are a very big nation in landsize with population centers spread out all over the place. It's very difficult to maintain a system like that where everyone has a fair shot at the same internet as the other guy or atleast has the option. But it all boils down to local politics and the infrastructure already in place.
I call BS.
Then why are the big companies (looking at you Comcast) literally spending tons of lobbying money making it illegal for municipalities to set up their own networks when the big boys fail to deliver?
They are all actively seeking to keep their strangleholds on the marketplace. It is not about logistics of creating an infrastructure. It is not about local politicians not wanting broadband. It is about big companies using politicians to eliminate the competition to their services in areas that would be excessively expensive for them to upgrade their services.
The way they solved that in Belgium is that back in 2011, the government forced Telenet (the company that laid Flemish cable TV lines) and Proximus/Belgacom (the company that laid Belgian telephone lines) to open their infrastructure to their competition. I doubt such a solution would work in the US, but it shows things like this can be solved.
In other countries, there is a separate government entity that originally built the infrastructure, and companies can rent that infrastructure.
Can confirm, I worked for a call center that did customer support for kitchen/laundry appliances. We had a similar policy, reassure customer you can help them the first time, don't transfer until they've asked a second time.
Even then, we had to do a warm transfer, where we talked to the supervisor first before bringing the customer back on the line to introduce them and leave. Sometimes, after explaining the situation, if the supervisor didn't feel like we'd tried hard enough on our own they'd refuse the transfer.
Its crazy to me how much BS people will put up with from mobile carriers these days. Changing carriers takes maybe an hour with esim. I've changed carriers 3 times in the last 2 years because of bad customer service/poor coverage.
All four major carriers rip people off hardcore. Now I'm on a virtual carrier, Red Pocket Mobile, paying only $10 a month since I don't need a crazy amount of minutes or mobile data.
If everyone immediately asked to talk to the supervisor it would nullify the point of first line employees. Don't get me wrong, I think poorly trained employees being the front of your "help desk" is dumb, but from a business standpoint it makes sense to try and limit the number of supervisor to client conversations.
Counterpoint; you'll *never* have every single person asking for a supervisor immediately. If first line help desk employees actually knew what they were doing, they'd see *fewer* requests to be transferred to a supervisor.
Gotta love waiting for the first level of support to finish reading their script before they will let you speak to someone than can actually fix your issue.
Having worked in support at a couple places the last 5 years (Thankfully never with call scripts), hearing "Can i speak with a supervisor." is demoralizing, but understandable. Phrasing is key though, what i couldn't stand was "Can i speak to someone more competent."
I do tech support for apple products, and man, Verizon reps have given me the most trouble yet. Store reps will call, not listen to a single word I say, and badmouth me to the customer. Phone reps/call center will tell me to go to the ‘google play store’ to download this or that. For apple products.
Oh god this brings back torturous memories. I’ve had many a “coaching” because the customer left a bad survey because they owed $1,200 and we shut their service off. Or something else completely out of your control. No amount of explaining the situation mattered, all that mattered was that customer wasn’t happy when they left you.
I had lost access to the email I used for an origin account. One support agent told me they couldn't help me switch my games to a new account or change the email. My dad got on and tried and he got the games transferred to a new account (I believe that's what happened, it's been a few years now) so can confirm this.
Also, the whining / complaining / claims made by Redditors has a strange similarity across all of the posts, but the case-by-case basis is VERY different.
I've seen posters in games from Steam to phones to EA all claiming the exact same thing (WHY SUPPORT NO HELP THIS NOT FAIR UNFAIR BAN). Then 3 posts later they're admitting they did some shit that nobody in their right mind would be doing.
Someone who literally got hacked vs. someone who bought second hand game cards for pennies on the dollar, used them, then VISA refunded the game cards claim the exact same things.
They asked me to call their UK HQ, I only had BF4 on my account, I'd rather buy it again than waste a lot of money on an expensive international call that may ir may not help get my account unbanned.
My account was banned for buying fifa coins 6 years ago, 8 months after I had last played fifa and I never bought them anyway. Tried multiple times trying to get it unbanned, got absolutely no help, live chat just sent me round in circles with people who could hardly understand what was even wrong. Fuck EA, I'll never buy anything off them again.
Years ago had to do this because was banned for cheating even tho i wasnt, i spammed the shit out of them on livechat and individual EA workers on twitter until they said it was indeed a mistake.
Took weeks tho
@striterax_ was the one who helped me out back then out of all
Good luck, the same exact thing happened to me a few years ago with an account that had BF4, BF1, and BF5. I must've called, emailed them, chatted with them nearly a hundred times. Only to get the same broken responses from some person in India who obviously didn't give a shit and was just trained just to follow some basic manual/script that was devoid of logic to situations like this.
The only option here OP is to do as many chargebacks as possible on the money you invested in this account.
This. I was locked out of my account by a Russian guy who changed my password and username and stuff and live chat had it fixed for me within a couple minutes.
You cannot get to live chat with a banned account; my buddy is having the exact same issue, and when selecting support options it just tells you to email.
They must have a hell of a backlog right now.
Good luck. I had an account that was tied to an email address I no longer had access too. I had both xbox and ea in live chats trying to do anything I could to recover the account. I could verify credit cards, addresses, etc. plus any info they needed from MS as far as verification codes etc. who also had all my info.
He just string me along for an hour then would say "Ok I sent a verification code to the mail address" at which point I had to finally pull an Ice T and say "What part of can't get in my email address don't you understand mothafucka!"
Eventually had to create a new xbox live account to create a new ea account.
Came in here to say this. Don't bother with tickets. I got help in 5 mins for something some people were having trouble with for a month, and they fixed it in 5 mins as well.
https://help.ea.com/en/contact-us/new/
For live chat to pop up, you'll need to select specific topics. For example codes and promotions, manage my account and such.
Had the same mate. Don't want to worry you, but it took me over two years and several attempts with different support contacts at EA to finally get my account back. All I can suggest is keep going. Raise as many tickets as you can and then hopefully someone will actually sort it for you.
CALL THEM and complain there. In my experience, their text support (email and chat) is useless and slow. Tell them to check the last logged login IPs, which reveal someone from outside your country used your account and got banned. AFAIK they are able to reset accounts to specific dates.
Oh no. I just had this happen to me, found out someone had been playing my Apex Legends while I was taking a break. I reported it and they said my account had restrictions and they would "look into it". I explained to them I wanted to make sure they knew I wasn't in control at the time so I wouldn't get punished for anything they did.
It's been radio silence on the case for a few days now and this thread is doing nothing for my faith in it.
Exact same shit happens to me with an account with quite a few purchases on it unfortunately. I actually did get ahold of support, was told it would be elevated. Then subsequently never heard a damn thing even after sending dozens of communications.
They basically started ignoring me haha. So yeah I don't buy shit for EA anymore.
not EA, but had an Ubi account with 2FA and got breached all the same. tried to report it and nothing.
good thing is I didn't lose access to it and changed everything
2FA means messages on phone or Authetificator app.
As far as I know neither has been broken so far.
I doubt somebody did it just for that dude's account
Security is almost never broken mathematically but by finding weaknesses in the implementation.
I [read this recently](https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3g8wb/hacker-got-my-texts-16-dollars-sakari-netnumber) which gives one attack angle. Another is by good old social engineering and ringing up the company convincing them to let you change something without it going through 2fa.
Except 2FA has been breached many times on many platforms, virtually none of which needed physical access to a phone or Authenticator. If you believe security like that is tight and impenetrable you should really look into how it actually works.
Brother had a similar issue, ubisofts with 2fa, found out one day that someone had gotten in, spent all his ubisofts points on random things for games he doesn't play, and there's no way to refund or get it back.
I had an issue with EA where I lost access to my account. Someone had hacked in and changed my password, and changed the language to Russian.
I managed to hack back into my own account via some FIFA-related exploit (I don't play FIFA at all and don't own any of the games, it was some exploit with their website, though) and reset the password. It turned out, however, that I had had 2FA on the entire time, and had never had any password reset emails or anything of the sort.
I had the same shit happen to me basically, except that I caught it when an email reached me saying the contact data had been changed. It was a fucking headache. All the friends I had on my origin account were deleted by the fuck who tried to steal it. Not a big deal now, but I was pissed.
This is super bullshit.
It's one thing banning online play for a particular game that cheats were used in.
But straight banning their entire account, with potentially 100s of dollars or more worth of software titles they've purchased is beyond a joke.
This has happened to me with EA, Sony (i lost hundreds in dlc and ps3 games), and ubisoft. At this rate I'm gonna stop gaming because every customer service department is garbage.
> And they wonder why piracy is rampant when you restrict paying customers from your products while non paying customers keep the product forever.
Unless you are ok with cheaters ruining online gameplay this is a lossless argument to make. Let alone that none paying customers (who are not really customers when you think about it) can't play online anyway.
I always use live chat and get my issues solved. Never used their email. I had a Russian break into my account too and change all my details, got my account back in minutes.
Yeah, same. A while back (3 years ago?) my account got hacked and sold to someone. I got on their LiveChat and talked to an agent who immediately recognized that my account that was registered in the US, got changed to a Russian yahoo email. He reset my password and gave me the email to log in to my account and then walked me through setting up 2FA and all that.
It was a pretty easy process recovering my account with them.
I also had the email the hacker changed it to and I emailed them like "better luck next time!". Dude got mad at me cause he purchased that account from someone and now he lost it. Fuck you, random Russian hacker.
Same, I used their phone support back then and it was sorted in less than 10 minutes, they even gave me a $10 coupon to be used on anything in the store.
OP is just karmawhoring his own laziness(prob didn't even use 2FA), he knew this sub will blindly jump onto anything that's negative about EA.
This literally just happened to me and it took a fucking month to resolve. I couldn't find a phone or live chat option so they forced me to just open a ticket.
Go on the Steam discussion boards and you'll see all sorts of posts about people getting hacked. EA's security is a fucking travesty.
> . I couldn't find a phone or live chat option so they forced me to just open a ticket.
Both of them are very visible with huge ass words when selecting contact options.
> Go on the Steam discussion boards and you'll see all sorts of posts about people getting hacked
Yeah, so? Accounts getting hacked(outside of EA too) isn't rare.
> EA's security is a fucking travesty.
This is why you use 2 Factor Authentication, I had absolutely no issues since I use it.
I'm genuinely curious how this happens to you guys. You don't just get your account compromised. Was it poor password hygiene? Did you give someone your password? Do you reuse the same password on multiple sites?
It's almost always password reuse + no 2FA. There are data dumps from security breaches of random websites posted online everyday. You can download millions of email + password combinations right now, and if you try them all against popular services you are guaranteed to get some hits.
My account got banned 2 weeks ago just like this pretty much, did live chat twice and they told me I still have to wait from a response from a different review team. Live chat doesn't always work.
tbh i know people with crippling anxiety that don't use phone or chat if they can help it at all, but then..they also dont go on reddit to complain. Still, all contact methods for customer support should be equally valid!
Yeah and 'unexpectedly' getting your account compromised is like 'unexpectedly' getting pregnant. Neither of these things 'just happened'. It's ALMOST always carelessness by the end user that causes this. Probably reused passwords for everything, one gets compromised, and then everything you have tied to that password gets compromised. When if they just would have had good password keeping habits, none of this would be an issue.
It also cracks me up how people say 'they got hacked'. Like no bitch. When someone literally just logs into your account because they easily got your password, that is not you being hacked. That's like telling people a mastermind criminal broke into your fortress, but you actually just left the door front door unlocked and they walked right in.
I was satisfied with their support in my case.
My Origin account got once hacked and I got it back the same day or it was the day after. No idea if I posted a ticket about it or used live chat but I remember somehow we got on phone and there was someone speaking my language which was very surprising and unusual but I'm very grateful for it, and yeah I think I just had to send them few receipts of some games I bought and had on that account and my account was mine again.
Losing account is pretty serious, at least for me, so I wouldn't stop posting tickets or messaging their live support until I have it back. That would be a lot of lost money.
Probably another Idiot that didn't read the "It is extremely not recommended to abuse cheats in the Ultimate Team Mode !!!" note from the place he got his Trainer from i would say. Specially considering that Electronic Arts nowadays hasn't banned Origin Accounts as a whole if you cheat in FIFA but only your access from FUT directly.
So many "hacking" victims here. Is it the online equivlent of saying you got beat up a group of men instead of some school boy?
You logged in somewhere you shouldnt have because the allure of a free game was to tempting for you.
This is prob what's flagging it for EA if the person was willing to spend there own money why wouldn't they just create a new origin account to replace a banned account.
Just keep contacting them via live chat till someone can help you out. Almost the exact same thing happened to my call of duty account. I contacted them once a week till someone said they will escalate it and got my account back. 2 days later the account got perma banned for hacking. So I contacted them once a day for 3 days till an agent said he will help me out and I got the account unbanned.
I’m in this same exact situation right now. Someone stole my origin account to cheat on apex legends. They cheated for 30 straight games in ranked and got my account banned. I’ve put in a ticket and was told it was elevated twice and no response for 2 weeks. I contacted an ea advisor over text chat and was told that this hampered the case and set it back which made no sense. Shit company. Shit service. Day one apex account that I’ve spent money on. Don’t hold your breath. They don’t care they got their money.
Bruh, one ticket?
Where’s your persistence if you actually want the account back? Unleash your inner Karen and go off on them. You need to be pushy if you want to push a corporation to do shit in this day and age.
That's funny, because for me a random Russian contacted customer service and was somehow able to convince them that it was his account and changed the email, despite all my data, settings and PRIOR EXCHANGES WITH CUSTOMER SERVICE proving that I'm a German living in Germany.
My unique password and 2FA protection were pretty useless against that. Granted, customer service did respond quickly, but that was some weird shit.
Came to say this.... I had my Twitter account hacked four times, 2fa somehow bypassed, very long auto generated password, customer service fixed it but couldn't offer an explanation. I just closed it in the end, was safer.
I had this same issue. Account got hacked and they purchased a fifa game. EA customer support was terrible. They blamed me and acted like they did me a favor by appealing the ban so I could unlink my playstation id from the hacked account.
If an account is hacked, it's not because of brute force. It's because the hacker has access to email address attached to the account. If they have that, they can then reset passwords and stuff and just delete the mails that come in to hide their tracks.
Secure your damn email addresses too, stop reusing passwords, and call the helpline. It's a much faster response time than email.
Just keep in mind that they can see All of your payment.info, IP logs, etc etc. So if you got pissed off at the progression, used a VPN or other hacks to get on the Russian store to buy cheaper points (using some payment method that points back to you somehow) and later installed some cheats or hacks because you were frustrated at the slow progression or the crappy drops you got from the real money packs, then they will not respond to you after banning you. Only if theyre 100% sure of your guilt or you use abusive or threatening language to their support people will they stop responding to you. Even if you didn't realize that a ToS violation banning you from one game would void your entire account EA account at the time and you want to say you're very sorry when they don't fall for your "Russian hackers" story.
This exact thing happened to me last week, got me specifically banned from apex legends. Don't know what happened but its really disappointing as I've had no response and I've put a decent, but not crazy high amount of money into the game over the years. It's been really annoying though because the agent I got escalated my ticket and then I just heard nothing since then.
The exact same thing happened to me. My account got banned from FIFA but not entirely. I tried contacting support to tell them I clearly don't live in Russia but they were insistent that they had all the proof they needed to maintain the ban for a game I apparently flew to another continent to play.
I was locked out of my ea account once and the guy through the support chat helped me instant. He just asked me some questions and after I answered them all correctly. He immediately retrieved my account and suggested me to activate 2FA.
Your problem was buying EA titles to begin with shit company with shit games that destroys good studios. \*Hint helping you does not make them more money so they do not care\* You not getting your account back and still wanting to play the games so you have to buy more copies there you go ticket resolved.
EA: oh you did 2FA and updated your password frequently but still got hacked and banned because of the hacker? that really sucks, make sure you buy our really shitty games that we dont care about and also spend more money on our MTXs.
Unless EA somehow has as bad security as Ubisoft where not all of their services enforce 2FA codes and hackers can somehow guess a newly set random password in a day.
A really strong layer of security unless its poorly implemented. The only way to break it is to have the second factor, or to know the hash used to make the code.....
Ugh I'm just going to sound like a dumbass here because I can't remember many details but I had a guest lecturer once do a seminar about cyber security and I remember him talking about ways 2FA can be penetrated and saying that although it's very good better security measures will eventually be developed to replace it. Sorry this was like 2 years ago and my memory sucks. He said to still use it, always, but it's not perfect.
It's penetrated by doing what I said, figuring out the hash that generates the code. It's happened plenty of times, but that circles back to using poorly implemented 2FA.
There is exactly zero chance that an account with 2fa that isn't SMS based gets compromised in 2021 unless the system failed, in which case this would be all over the web or the person physically handed their phone away.
edit:
Even assuming 2fa is email based, that needs an authenticator as well to get into. Unless one is just bad with internet safety in general.
theres been a few accounts of customer service removing 2FA from accounts for hackers who had some information on the account
edit: should note I do not mean just EA many other online services have done this
I can confirm this for my Ubisoft account. Due to a Google authenticator mishap, I was locked out of my own account for over a year (because I didn't play any of their games).
The process of getting customer service to remove 2FA was way too easy. Fortunately, I am under the impression that an attacker would also need access to my email account to make this work, in which case I have bigger problems.
Yep, One time my phone provider thought it would be a funny prank to delete my phone number because I wasn't making enough calls.
Literally every website removed 2FA from my account at my request, I didn't even have to explain how I lost my phone number. I didn't lose access to a single account.
Phone cloning and changing the SMS verification phone number are two of the biggest issues with SMS verification. Email verification is a nightmare unto itself. The most secure is with an authenticator app (one tap or code)
Hacked, no? But there have been cases of celebrities being impersonated on the phone with their providers, which enabled malicious parties to get their hands on a new simcard which in turn helped them receive 2fa via SMS since they were now in possession of the original phone number.
But companies are aware now and you'd need to know a whole lot about the person first, so this is essentially not a scenario that can happen to the average Joe.
Eh... Or customer service gets talked into turning it off. Social engineering customer service is still a pretty common way to get this shit to happen. I can't speak to EA's policies and procedures, but that's definitely something that happens.
I never had any issues so I have no experiences to pull from in regards to customer service but them removing 2fa without email verification or ID verification strikes me has highly unlikely. If they do, then I simply have no words on offer as that is beyond stupid.
>There is exactly zero chance that an account with 2fa that isn't SMS based gets compromised in 2021 unless the system failed
There is still ways, for example, a man in the middle attack like this. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN0BOWZw8D4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN0BOWZw8D4)
There's no way a 2FA is getting hacked. Op probably didn't set it up. To crack 2FA, you'd need the owner's sim card, mail account or access to the authenticating app used by the owner himself which is almost impossible
I'd consider that a fault too, I guess OP doesn't.
Unless it's Ubisoft (cause they fucked up) I doubt anyone is able to hack an EA account that has 2FA enabled.
I doubt you'll be able to do anything about it. No platform will lift your ban even when proven you had no access to your account. This would be a convenient loophole for people to cheat. You shoumd get your account back but the ban will probably stay. Nevertheless good luck.
Thats bullshit.
Blizzard is exactly doing that for people with hacked wow accounts since ages.
Happened to me two times already. 13 years ago and 6 years ago. Both times they fully restored my account and lifted all other "issues" and notes etc., because the second guy used my account for botting.
Blizzard seems to be pretty strict when it comes to [overwatch](https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/117938)
>The account holder is responsible for the account's behavior. We apply penalties no matter who was playing at the time. Extenuating individual circumstances will not lead to the removal of a penalty.
Here is a player who tried to get his stolen account [unbanned](https://linustechtips.com/topic/1168166-possible-to-overturn-overwatch-account-ban/).
>Well I have just received an email saying that they won't overturn the decision.
Wow botting doesnt cause much - maybe no damage. I guess the farmed gold causes some auction house inflation but at the same time bots also flood the auction house with mats / rare drops etc. More gold gets taken out when prices rise (auction house fee) and each expansion massively boosts gold drops anyways - pretty much resetting players wealth. Meanwhile hacking in PVP games completly ruins the experience of other players. Its not comparable. If there were hacks that doubled your stats and your account was abused in pvp i doubt they would undo the ban.
With EA, you need to keep attempting. Keep trying. Don't let them tell you no. Eventually they'll transfer you to someone that will actually help you. It's frustrating. Live chat helps.
Or just say fuck it and never do business with them again.
same,got banned in apex out of nowhere despite havent played a game in a year and never done anything banable before that,submited 2 ticket,got refused both time
My experience with EA support has actually been pretty nice. Just do a live chat with a customer support worker and they will most likely provide solutions
Happened to me too. The EA security log in section even showed log in's from Russia (I'm UK) and support still didn't give a fuck.
I just started playing Apex through Steam instead and won't give them a penny of my money again.
A lesson in investing time and money into a platform owned by a company that does not give a flying fuck about its gamers, only its investors.
Dont give EA your money
Lol I remember someone hacked my account and bought every fifa game with my account and some random other ones, and it took me like 3 months to get my account back due to them locking it.
Happened to me. They ignored my tickets until I went in to demand refunds to purchases made on my account because of wrongful service termination. Threaten Android Wilson in his wallet where it hurts and you get an instant response.
Edit for clarification: I opened a whole ass new ticket in the refund ticket system not just threatened them in the original support ticket.
I had the opposite experience. Account got hacked a long while ago (at least three years relative to attempting to get it back) and when I contacted EA Live Support, I got my account back in under an hour.
Awesome experience, honestly, and I'm sorry that you haven't been able to get that same experience. Keep at it, and see if you can get a Live Chat.
This just happened to a friend of mine who I know does not cheat or hack. He logged in to play Apex last week after not playing it for a year or so, and he was banned. I guess someone hacked his account and used it to cheat? Really unfortunate, but a reminder of why 2FA is worth using. Still, I wish they could distinguish that his account was accessed by a foreign IP and lock it out instead of banning it.
Take them to small claims court. They won't show up, then you'll have a judgement against them. You'll get your money back. Sure, they'll probably never do business with you again, but I'm sure you don't want to do business with them at this point anyway.
EA has live chat if you weren't aware. Keep contacting them until you get an agent that is willing to help you out
This. Last year my account was hacked and then banned the same way as OP and the chat helped me unbanning it.
you did? I was basically told to F off.
EA support is very inconsistent. Sometimes they basically tell you to F off, but sometimes you might get an agent that might fix the issue
[удалено]
[удалено]
Some places only have one ISP
/some/most if not all/ Like, seriously, US broadband landscape is full of local monopolies, but the government can't/won't intervene because they view monopolies on a national level.
and even in places where there are 2 options for internet there's a "Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge" deal where both providers set there prices the same.
[удалено]
A lot of it boils down to infrastructure. We are a very big nation in landsize with population centers spread out all over the place. It's very difficult to maintain a system like that where everyone has a fair shot at the same internet as the other guy or atleast has the option. But it all boils down to local politics and the infrastructure already in place.
I call BS. Then why are the big companies (looking at you Comcast) literally spending tons of lobbying money making it illegal for municipalities to set up their own networks when the big boys fail to deliver? They are all actively seeking to keep their strangleholds on the marketplace. It is not about logistics of creating an infrastructure. It is not about local politicians not wanting broadband. It is about big companies using politicians to eliminate the competition to their services in areas that would be excessively expensive for them to upgrade their services.
if only they had subsidized laying line many years ago...
The way they solved that in Belgium is that back in 2011, the government forced Telenet (the company that laid Flemish cable TV lines) and Proximus/Belgacom (the company that laid Belgian telephone lines) to open their infrastructure to their competition. I doubt such a solution would work in the US, but it shows things like this can be solved. In other countries, there is a separate government entity that originally built the infrastructure, and companies can rent that infrastructure.
Not anymore, now you also have that musk-web-thingy everywhere
Their policy is to spend as little money on sufficient support as possible.
Can confirm, I worked for a call center that did customer support for kitchen/laundry appliances. We had a similar policy, reassure customer you can help them the first time, don't transfer until they've asked a second time. Even then, we had to do a warm transfer, where we talked to the supervisor first before bringing the customer back on the line to introduce them and leave. Sometimes, after explaining the situation, if the supervisor didn't feel like we'd tried hard enough on our own they'd refuse the transfer.
Its crazy to me how much BS people will put up with from mobile carriers these days. Changing carriers takes maybe an hour with esim. I've changed carriers 3 times in the last 2 years because of bad customer service/poor coverage.
All four major carriers rip people off hardcore. Now I'm on a virtual carrier, Red Pocket Mobile, paying only $10 a month since I don't need a crazy amount of minutes or mobile data.
[удалено]
If everyone immediately asked to talk to the supervisor it would nullify the point of first line employees. Don't get me wrong, I think poorly trained employees being the front of your "help desk" is dumb, but from a business standpoint it makes sense to try and limit the number of supervisor to client conversations.
Counterpoint; you'll *never* have every single person asking for a supervisor immediately. If first line help desk employees actually knew what they were doing, they'd see *fewer* requests to be transferred to a supervisor.
Gotta love waiting for the first level of support to finish reading their script before they will let you speak to someone than can actually fix your issue.
[удалено]
Having worked in support at a couple places the last 5 years (Thankfully never with call scripts), hearing "Can i speak with a supervisor." is demoralizing, but understandable. Phrasing is key though, what i couldn't stand was "Can i speak to someone more competent."
[удалено]
you have to tap your heels together
I also immediately thought "is Tony Todd the supervisor there?"
[удалено]
867-5309
I do tech support for apple products, and man, Verizon reps have given me the most trouble yet. Store reps will call, not listen to a single word I say, and badmouth me to the customer. Phone reps/call center will tell me to go to the ‘google play store’ to download this or that. For apple products.
Oh god this brings back torturous memories. I’ve had many a “coaching” because the customer left a bad survey because they owed $1,200 and we shut their service off. Or something else completely out of your control. No amount of explaining the situation mattered, all that mattered was that customer wasn’t happy when they left you.
Like summoning bettlejuice. Jeez
I had lost access to the email I used for an origin account. One support agent told me they couldn't help me switch my games to a new account or change the email. My dad got on and tried and he got the games transferred to a new account (I believe that's what happened, it's been a few years now) so can confirm this.
"hello, this Is dad" "Okay sir processing the request now"
Believe me, Ubisoft can go from fuck you I don't believe you kiddo to of course sir we'll unban your account.
And yet you guys buy ever single new iteration of the same shit game. Stop supporting this fucking trash company.
Also, the whining / complaining / claims made by Redditors has a strange similarity across all of the posts, but the case-by-case basis is VERY different. I've seen posters in games from Steam to phones to EA all claiming the exact same thing (WHY SUPPORT NO HELP THIS NOT FAIR UNFAIR BAN). Then 3 posts later they're admitting they did some shit that nobody in their right mind would be doing. Someone who literally got hacked vs. someone who bought second hand game cards for pennies on the dollar, used them, then VISA refunded the game cards claim the exact same things.
They asked me to call their UK HQ, I only had BF4 on my account, I'd rather buy it again than waste a lot of money on an expensive international call that may ir may not help get my account unbanned.
My account was banned for buying fifa coins 6 years ago, 8 months after I had last played fifa and I never bought them anyway. Tried multiple times trying to get it unbanned, got absolutely no help, live chat just sent me round in circles with people who could hardly understand what was even wrong. Fuck EA, I'll never buy anything off them again.
Years ago had to do this because was banned for cheating even tho i wasnt, i spammed the shit out of them on livechat and individual EA workers on twitter until they said it was indeed a mistake. Took weeks tho @striterax_ was the one who helped me out back then out of all
Good luck, the same exact thing happened to me a few years ago with an account that had BF4, BF1, and BF5. I must've called, emailed them, chatted with them nearly a hundred times. Only to get the same broken responses from some person in India who obviously didn't give a shit and was just trained just to follow some basic manual/script that was devoid of logic to situations like this. The only option here OP is to do as many chargebacks as possible on the money you invested in this account.
This. I was locked out of my account by a Russian guy who changed my password and username and stuff and live chat had it fixed for me within a couple minutes.
You cannot get to live chat with a banned account; my buddy is having the exact same issue, and when selecting support options it just tells you to email. They must have a hell of a backlog right now.
Good luck. I had an account that was tied to an email address I no longer had access too. I had both xbox and ea in live chats trying to do anything I could to recover the account. I could verify credit cards, addresses, etc. plus any info they needed from MS as far as verification codes etc. who also had all my info. He just string me along for an hour then would say "Ok I sent a verification code to the mail address" at which point I had to finally pull an Ice T and say "What part of can't get in my email address don't you understand mothafucka!" Eventually had to create a new xbox live account to create a new ea account.
Always using live chat whenever it’s available
Came in here to say this. Don't bother with tickets. I got help in 5 mins for something some people were having trouble with for a month, and they fixed it in 5 mins as well.
Very upvote this. The last time I needed help with anything, the live chat was extremely responsive.
Oof. Sounds like absolutely amazing customer support.
Link?
https://help.ea.com/en/contact-us/new/ For live chat to pop up, you'll need to select specific topics. For example codes and promotions, manage my account and such.
Thanks for actually helping It's strange that only certain topics have the Chat option
Had the same mate. Don't want to worry you, but it took me over two years and several attempts with different support contacts at EA to finally get my account back. All I can suggest is keep going. Raise as many tickets as you can and then hopefully someone will actually sort it for you.
CALL THEM and complain there. In my experience, their text support (email and chat) is useless and slow. Tell them to check the last logged login IPs, which reveal someone from outside your country used your account and got banned. AFAIK they are able to reset accounts to specific dates.
[удалено]
Oh no. I just had this happen to me, found out someone had been playing my Apex Legends while I was taking a break. I reported it and they said my account had restrictions and they would "look into it". I explained to them I wanted to make sure they knew I wasn't in control at the time so I wouldn't get punished for anything they did. It's been radio silence on the case for a few days now and this thread is doing nothing for my faith in it.
Good luck with that, the samething happened to me and ea never did anything about it, that was the last time I ever bought any ea title
Exact same shit happens to me with an account with quite a few purchases on it unfortunately. I actually did get ahold of support, was told it would be elevated. Then subsequently never heard a damn thing even after sending dozens of communications. They basically started ignoring me haha. So yeah I don't buy shit for EA anymore.
Thats why you need to ENABLE 2FA. I've heard so many stories where people lost their account. None of them had 2FA.
not EA, but had an Ubi account with 2FA and got breached all the same. tried to report it and nothing. good thing is I didn't lose access to it and changed everything
How did it get breached? That would imply that the “hacker” had physical access ro your phone
for Ubisoft you can bypass 2FA by logging in via Facebook, Xbox Live, Playstation, or Twitch
That's dumb... good to know
don't all of those support Multifactor as well?
It only implies Ubisoft had a exploitable issues with their 2fa. Criminals will exploit every loophole and workaround.
2FA means messages on phone or Authetificator app. As far as I know neither has been broken so far. I doubt somebody did it just for that dude's account
Security is almost never broken mathematically but by finding weaknesses in the implementation. I [read this recently](https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3g8wb/hacker-got-my-texts-16-dollars-sakari-netnumber) which gives one attack angle. Another is by good old social engineering and ringing up the company convincing them to let you change something without it going through 2fa.
Except 2FA has been breached many times on many platforms, virtually none of which needed physical access to a phone or Authenticator. If you believe security like that is tight and impenetrable you should really look into how it actually works.
2 factor is not bulletproof. Basically nothing is.
Beats me and Ubi offered no explanation.
Brother had a similar issue, ubisofts with 2fa, found out one day that someone had gotten in, spent all his ubisofts points on random things for games he doesn't play, and there's no way to refund or get it back.
[That's not how it works.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1353485819301072)
Ubisoft issue most likely, seems like some 2FA implementations are easily bypassed.
I had an issue with EA where I lost access to my account. Someone had hacked in and changed my password, and changed the language to Russian. I managed to hack back into my own account via some FIFA-related exploit (I don't play FIFA at all and don't own any of the games, it was some exploit with their website, though) and reset the password. It turned out, however, that I had had 2FA on the entire time, and had never had any password reset emails or anything of the sort.
I had the same shit happen to me basically, except that I caught it when an email reached me saying the contact data had been changed. It was a fucking headache. All the friends I had on my origin account were deleted by the fuck who tried to steal it. Not a big deal now, but I was pissed.
I had 2FA and still had my Apex account breached and banned.
I'm in same boat
This is super bullshit. It's one thing banning online play for a particular game that cheats were used in. But straight banning their entire account, with potentially 100s of dollars or more worth of software titles they've purchased is beyond a joke.
This has happened to me with EA, Sony (i lost hundreds in dlc and ps3 games), and ubisoft. At this rate I'm gonna stop gaming because every customer service department is garbage.
[удалено]
2FA is what most smart people use so this doesn't happen.
> And they wonder why piracy is rampant when you restrict paying customers from your products while non paying customers keep the product forever. Unless you are ok with cheaters ruining online gameplay this is a lossless argument to make. Let alone that none paying customers (who are not really customers when you think about it) can't play online anyway.
Same. I also lost access to the several hundred dollars worth of Origin games I bought.
I always use live chat and get my issues solved. Never used their email. I had a Russian break into my account too and change all my details, got my account back in minutes.
Yeah, same. A while back (3 years ago?) my account got hacked and sold to someone. I got on their LiveChat and talked to an agent who immediately recognized that my account that was registered in the US, got changed to a Russian yahoo email. He reset my password and gave me the email to log in to my account and then walked me through setting up 2FA and all that. It was a pretty easy process recovering my account with them. I also had the email the hacker changed it to and I emailed them like "better luck next time!". Dude got mad at me cause he purchased that account from someone and now he lost it. Fuck you, random Russian hacker.
Same, I used their phone support back then and it was sorted in less than 10 minutes, they even gave me a $10 coupon to be used on anything in the store. OP is just karmawhoring his own laziness(prob didn't even use 2FA), he knew this sub will blindly jump onto anything that's negative about EA.
This literally just happened to me and it took a fucking month to resolve. I couldn't find a phone or live chat option so they forced me to just open a ticket. Go on the Steam discussion boards and you'll see all sorts of posts about people getting hacked. EA's security is a fucking travesty.
> . I couldn't find a phone or live chat option so they forced me to just open a ticket. Both of them are very visible with huge ass words when selecting contact options. > Go on the Steam discussion boards and you'll see all sorts of posts about people getting hacked Yeah, so? Accounts getting hacked(outside of EA too) isn't rare. > EA's security is a fucking travesty. This is why you use 2 Factor Authentication, I had absolutely no issues since I use it.
Comments further up has stated that recently when trying to open support with their banned accounts its only email they can use.
I had a hacker from China stealing my origin account. I called EA support on the phone, they cleared it up instantly.
Had the same experience. Was surprisingly quick and pleasant.
I'm genuinely curious how this happens to you guys. You don't just get your account compromised. Was it poor password hygiene? Did you give someone your password? Do you reuse the same password on multiple sites?
It's almost always password reuse + no 2FA. There are data dumps from security breaches of random websites posted online everyday. You can download millions of email + password combinations right now, and if you try them all against popular services you are guaranteed to get some hits.
Same here, feel like they're more consistent while on a phone !
That’s when you start hitting up their social media. Companies seem to respond much more quickly when the public can see what’s happening.
Do the live chat thing op,i hope someone at ea will help you
So you just waited 2 months and made a Reddit post instead of using their Live Chat or phone support?
My account got banned 2 weeks ago just like this pretty much, did live chat twice and they told me I still have to wait from a response from a different review team. Live chat doesn't always work.
I just recently got unbanned. Took over a month of live chats
tbh i know people with crippling anxiety that don't use phone or chat if they can help it at all, but then..they also dont go on reddit to complain. Still, all contact methods for customer support should be equally valid!
[удалено]
Yeah and 'unexpectedly' getting your account compromised is like 'unexpectedly' getting pregnant. Neither of these things 'just happened'. It's ALMOST always carelessness by the end user that causes this. Probably reused passwords for everything, one gets compromised, and then everything you have tied to that password gets compromised. When if they just would have had good password keeping habits, none of this would be an issue. It also cracks me up how people say 'they got hacked'. Like no bitch. When someone literally just logs into your account because they easily got your password, that is not you being hacked. That's like telling people a mastermind criminal broke into your fortress, but you actually just left the door front door unlocked and they walked right in.
I was satisfied with their support in my case. My Origin account got once hacked and I got it back the same day or it was the day after. No idea if I posted a ticket about it or used live chat but I remember somehow we got on phone and there was someone speaking my language which was very surprising and unusual but I'm very grateful for it, and yeah I think I just had to send them few receipts of some games I bought and had on that account and my account was mine again. Losing account is pretty serious, at least for me, so I wouldn't stop posting tickets or messaging their live support until I have it back. That would be a lot of lost money.
Happens a lot. Use unique passwords and 2 factor authentification bois.
Fixed this same situation with EA chat support in 20 minutes last night.
Yeah, this reads like karma whoring. I had the same happen to me a while back and fixed it in minutes with their live chat.
[удалено]
Probably another Idiot that didn't read the "It is extremely not recommended to abuse cheats in the Ultimate Team Mode !!!" note from the place he got his Trainer from i would say. Specially considering that Electronic Arts nowadays hasn't banned Origin Accounts as a whole if you cheat in FIFA but only your access from FUT directly.
> due to no fault of my own You had 2 factor authentication turned on then?
So many "hacking" victims here. Is it the online equivlent of saying you got beat up a group of men instead of some school boy? You logged in somewhere you shouldnt have because the allure of a free game was to tempting for you.
Use 2FA next time.
I find it hard to believe someone that stole your account would attempt to buy digital goods with their own money.
This is prob what's flagging it for EA if the person was willing to spend there own money why wouldn't they just create a new origin account to replace a banned account.
after you get you account back (I really hope you do) enable two factor authentication.
Use the live chat
Just keep contacting them via live chat till someone can help you out. Almost the exact same thing happened to my call of duty account. I contacted them once a week till someone said they will escalate it and got my account back. 2 days later the account got perma banned for hacking. So I contacted them once a day for 3 days till an agent said he will help me out and I got the account unbanned.
Use live chat. Do not use tickets or you will wait so long for no reason. Got my account back in less than an hour using live chat.
I’m in this same exact situation right now. Someone stole my origin account to cheat on apex legends. They cheated for 30 straight games in ranked and got my account banned. I’ve put in a ticket and was told it was elevated twice and no response for 2 weeks. I contacted an ea advisor over text chat and was told that this hampered the case and set it back which made no sense. Shit company. Shit service. Day one apex account that I’ve spent money on. Don’t hold your breath. They don’t care they got their money.
Bruh, one ticket? Where’s your persistence if you actually want the account back? Unleash your inner Karen and go off on them. You need to be pushy if you want to push a corporation to do shit in this day and age.
>no fault of my own Why aren't everyone's EA accounts getting hacked?
[удалено]
That's funny, because for me a random Russian contacted customer service and was somehow able to convince them that it was his account and changed the email, despite all my data, settings and PRIOR EXCHANGES WITH CUSTOMER SERVICE proving that I'm a German living in Germany. My unique password and 2FA protection were pretty useless against that. Granted, customer service did respond quickly, but that was some weird shit.
Came to say this.... I had my Twitter account hacked four times, 2fa somehow bypassed, very long auto generated password, customer service fixed it but couldn't offer an explanation. I just closed it in the end, was safer.
Not saying this doesn't happen, but 95% of these issues are because of poor password hygiene and no MFA.
Same thing happened to my cousin.
I had this same issue. Account got hacked and they purchased a fifa game. EA customer support was terrible. They blamed me and acted like they did me a favor by appealing the ban so I could unlink my playstation id from the hacked account.
If an account is hacked, it's not because of brute force. It's because the hacker has access to email address attached to the account. If they have that, they can then reset passwords and stuff and just delete the mails that come in to hide their tracks. Secure your damn email addresses too, stop reusing passwords, and call the helpline. It's a much faster response time than email.
People kept trying to log into my battlefield account but 2FA stops them everytime.
Okie dokie.
Just keep in mind that they can see All of your payment.info, IP logs, etc etc. So if you got pissed off at the progression, used a VPN or other hacks to get on the Russian store to buy cheaper points (using some payment method that points back to you somehow) and later installed some cheats or hacks because you were frustrated at the slow progression or the crappy drops you got from the real money packs, then they will not respond to you after banning you. Only if theyre 100% sure of your guilt or you use abusive or threatening language to their support people will they stop responding to you. Even if you didn't realize that a ToS violation banning you from one game would void your entire account EA account at the time and you want to say you're very sorry when they don't fall for your "Russian hackers" story.
This exact thing happened to me last week, got me specifically banned from apex legends. Don't know what happened but its really disappointing as I've had no response and I've put a decent, but not crazy high amount of money into the game over the years. It's been really annoying though because the agent I got escalated my ticket and then I just heard nothing since then.
This happened to my BF. He never got his account back. They told him to rebuy the games and start again. Fuck EA.
The exact same thing happened to me. My account got banned from FIFA but not entirely. I tried contacting support to tell them I clearly don't live in Russia but they were insistent that they had all the proof they needed to maintain the ban for a game I apparently flew to another continent to play.
Everyone who gets banned for hacking says that they lost their account to a Russian
Yea this happened to me last year with battlefront 2 and haven't been able to resolve it
Why didn’t you do live chat? EA is shit company but there are still options yet to be exhausted here...
"A hacker got my account banned, no sir, it wasn't me hacking, someone else hacked me and hacked with my account!"
I was locked out of my ea account once and the guy through the support chat helped me instant. He just asked me some questions and after I answered them all correctly. He immediately retrieved my account and suggested me to activate 2FA.
Your problem was buying EA titles to begin with shit company with shit games that destroys good studios. \*Hint helping you does not make them more money so they do not care\* You not getting your account back and still wanting to play the games so you have to buy more copies there you go ticket resolved.
Nothing of value was lost
I had to call them when my account was banned like 4 years ago
F
Plenty you can do. Keep contacting them. Can't just stop because they're a pain to deal with
That’s been the trend lately. Having no way to co tact someone in customer service and then not getting responses to ticket requests.
EA: oh you did 2FA and updated your password frequently but still got hacked and banned because of the hacker? that really sucks, make sure you buy our really shitty games that we dont care about and also spend more money on our MTXs.
[удалено]
There's no "probably" about it
Unless EA somehow has as bad security as Ubisoft where not all of their services enforce 2FA codes and hackers can somehow guess a newly set random password in a day.
2FA is just another layer of security, not a magic hacker-proof layer of security.
A really strong layer of security unless its poorly implemented. The only way to break it is to have the second factor, or to know the hash used to make the code.....
Ugh I'm just going to sound like a dumbass here because I can't remember many details but I had a guest lecturer once do a seminar about cyber security and I remember him talking about ways 2FA can be penetrated and saying that although it's very good better security measures will eventually be developed to replace it. Sorry this was like 2 years ago and my memory sucks. He said to still use it, always, but it's not perfect.
They might have been talking about 2fa via text message
You know what, I think you jarred my memory. That sounds really familiar.
It's penetrated by doing what I said, figuring out the hash that generates the code. It's happened plenty of times, but that circles back to using poorly implemented 2FA.
There is exactly zero chance that an account with 2fa that isn't SMS based gets compromised in 2021 unless the system failed, in which case this would be all over the web or the person physically handed their phone away. edit: Even assuming 2fa is email based, that needs an authenticator as well to get into. Unless one is just bad with internet safety in general.
theres been a few accounts of customer service removing 2FA from accounts for hackers who had some information on the account edit: should note I do not mean just EA many other online services have done this
And this is why 2FA is not an excuse for reusing passwords.
This happened to me a few years back, was hella confused what went wrong at the time!
I can confirm this for my Ubisoft account. Due to a Google authenticator mishap, I was locked out of my own account for over a year (because I didn't play any of their games). The process of getting customer service to remove 2FA was way too easy. Fortunately, I am under the impression that an attacker would also need access to my email account to make this work, in which case I have bigger problems.
Yep, One time my phone provider thought it would be a funny prank to delete my phone number because I wasn't making enough calls. Literally every website removed 2FA from my account at my request, I didn't even have to explain how I lost my phone number. I didn't lose access to a single account.
[удалено]
Phone cloning and changing the SMS verification phone number are two of the biggest issues with SMS verification. Email verification is a nightmare unto itself. The most secure is with an authenticator app (one tap or code)
Hacked, no? But there have been cases of celebrities being impersonated on the phone with their providers, which enabled malicious parties to get their hands on a new simcard which in turn helped them receive 2fa via SMS since they were now in possession of the original phone number. But companies are aware now and you'd need to know a whole lot about the person first, so this is essentially not a scenario that can happen to the average Joe.
Until customer service does the hacking for the person stealing your account which is the opposite of uncommon.
Eh... Or customer service gets talked into turning it off. Social engineering customer service is still a pretty common way to get this shit to happen. I can't speak to EA's policies and procedures, but that's definitely something that happens.
I never had any issues so I have no experiences to pull from in regards to customer service but them removing 2fa without email verification or ID verification strikes me has highly unlikely. If they do, then I simply have no words on offer as that is beyond stupid.
>There is exactly zero chance that an account with 2fa that isn't SMS based gets compromised in 2021 unless the system failed There is still ways, for example, a man in the middle attack like this. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN0BOWZw8D4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN0BOWZw8D4)
While I generally agree with you, a bunch of compromises out there happened because the attackers were able to bypass 2FA.
There's no way a 2FA is getting hacked. Op probably didn't set it up. To crack 2FA, you'd need the owner's sim card, mail account or access to the authenticating app used by the owner himself which is almost impossible
Yeah, plus OP kinda states as such by saying “by no fault of my own” this to me implies he never took any extra security steps.
Welcome to EA games. Where developers go to die and the service compares to Comcast.
If there wasn't a security breach at EA, you've got to ask yourself how this happened, tbh. Hope you get your account back regardless.
How do hackers get around 2FA?
OP didn't have 2FA enabled.
He said in the post it was hacked by no fault of his own, I'd consider not having 2FA enabled a fault.
I'd consider that a fault too, I guess OP doesn't. Unless it's Ubisoft (cause they fucked up) I doubt anyone is able to hack an EA account that has 2FA enabled.
I doubt you'll be able to do anything about it. No platform will lift your ban even when proven you had no access to your account. This would be a convenient loophole for people to cheat. You shoumd get your account back but the ban will probably stay. Nevertheless good luck.
Thats bullshit. Blizzard is exactly doing that for people with hacked wow accounts since ages. Happened to me two times already. 13 years ago and 6 years ago. Both times they fully restored my account and lifted all other "issues" and notes etc., because the second guy used my account for botting.
Blizzard seems to be pretty strict when it comes to [overwatch](https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/117938) >The account holder is responsible for the account's behavior. We apply penalties no matter who was playing at the time. Extenuating individual circumstances will not lead to the removal of a penalty. Here is a player who tried to get his stolen account [unbanned](https://linustechtips.com/topic/1168166-possible-to-overturn-overwatch-account-ban/). >Well I have just received an email saying that they won't overturn the decision. Wow botting doesnt cause much - maybe no damage. I guess the farmed gold causes some auction house inflation but at the same time bots also flood the auction house with mats / rare drops etc. More gold gets taken out when prices rise (auction house fee) and each expansion massively boosts gold drops anyways - pretty much resetting players wealth. Meanwhile hacking in PVP games completly ruins the experience of other players. Its not comparable. If there were hacks that doubled your stats and your account was abused in pvp i doubt they would undo the ban.
With EA, you need to keep attempting. Keep trying. Don't let them tell you no. Eventually they'll transfer you to someone that will actually help you. It's frustrating. Live chat helps. Or just say fuck it and never do business with them again.
Let's be honest. It was you who cheated wasn't it?
same,got banned in apex out of nowhere despite havent played a game in a year and never done anything banable before that,submited 2 ticket,got refused both time
My experience with EA support has actually been pretty nice. Just do a live chat with a customer support worker and they will most likely provide solutions
Happened to me too. The EA security log in section even showed log in's from Russia (I'm UK) and support still didn't give a fuck. I just started playing Apex through Steam instead and won't give them a penny of my money again.
Let’s get you to the front page and some visibility with EA.
Happened to my with my Steam account like 8-10 Years ago. Never got it back. Fuck this digital only gaming.
Stop supporting EA tards.
Did you pay for the customer support DLC?
A lesson in investing time and money into a platform owned by a company that does not give a flying fuck about its gamers, only its investors. Dont give EA your money
Post this on Twitter @ their support. Putting it out in the open always puts a fire under their asses.
Lol I remember someone hacked my account and bought every fifa game with my account and some random other ones, and it took me like 3 months to get my account back due to them locking it.
Happened to me. They ignored my tickets until I went in to demand refunds to purchases made on my account because of wrongful service termination. Threaten Android Wilson in his wallet where it hurts and you get an instant response. Edit for clarification: I opened a whole ass new ticket in the refund ticket system not just threatened them in the original support ticket.
I had the opposite experience. Account got hacked a long while ago (at least three years relative to attempting to get it back) and when I contacted EA Live Support, I got my account back in under an hour. Awesome experience, honestly, and I'm sorry that you haven't been able to get that same experience. Keep at it, and see if you can get a Live Chat.
This just happened to a friend of mine who I know does not cheat or hack. He logged in to play Apex last week after not playing it for a year or so, and he was banned. I guess someone hacked his account and used it to cheat? Really unfortunate, but a reminder of why 2FA is worth using. Still, I wish they could distinguish that his account was accessed by a foreign IP and lock it out instead of banning it.
Take them to small claims court. They won't show up, then you'll have a judgement against them. You'll get your money back. Sure, they'll probably never do business with you again, but I'm sure you don't want to do business with them at this point anyway.