PlayOnline said:<TABLE class=ta_info3 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=480 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=500>Recently, we have received numerous calls from players who have had a third party log in to their PlayOnline account. This has resulted in lost items, gil, or even deleted characters.
Among these reports, there where many reports of players connecting to a site in order to get unauthorized third party programs, or actually using a third party program, were then infected with harmful programs such as viruses and spyware. In these cases, these programs likely transmitted PlayOnline IDs and passwords to a third party. Additionally, there were reports of players who had suspicious programs installed when connecting to websites that were told to them by strange players over the tell channel. In these cases, many people also were affected by unauthorized account access. We have also confirmed in our investigations that there are third party programs that can do these things out there.
These unauthorized programs are of a wide variety. Some make it so that FINAL FANTASY XI runs in a windowed mode rather than full screen, some allow players to transport to a spot when a specific monster spawns, and some that commence attacks on monsters automatically. Now, any use of a third party program is a violation of the PlayOnline user agreement. We will issue a serious penalty when we have evidence of a third party program being used.
To protect players from having their accounts logged into, on May 11, 2007, we posted "Notice for Windows Users: Recommended Precautionary Measures" on "Important Notices". If you are playing with the windows version, please read the announcement and we ask you to be extra cautious.
If you are unable to log-in with your PlayOnline account/password, or notice a change in your gil or items, please do not hesitate to contact us.
To protect your valuable characters and their data, and to also prevent you from being penalized for violating the user agreement, please keep away from third party programs and suspicious URLs.
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http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/polnews/news10410.shtml
Side Note: An added side effect of this is if you have other peoples' account information and passwords stored on the same computer, they can be hacked as well.
Examples:
http://www.bluegartrls.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19234 (Started 5/14/07)
http://www.killingifrit.com/forums.php?m=posts&q=153956 (Started 5/14/07)
Just don't do it. >.>
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