The World of Warcraft forums are buzzing with complaints from players claiming that their accounts have been suspended because of chargebacks filed against them by a company that they have no connection with. The problem, though, is that the company behind the charges is unresponsive to complaints, and many players don't know what to do in order to get their accounts re-authorized unless they pay these bills.

According to the thread, multiple players have received the following message when trying to figure out why their account is currently inaccessible: "Access to the World of Warcraft account *********, has been temporarily disabled due to a chargeback filed against the account's past payment(s) which were billed to a telephone number via PaymentOne." PaymentOne is a payment service provider, and has a system in place to bill players' ISP accounts for their WoW subscriptions.

Chargebacks are normally used as a method of consumer protection—a last line of defense against shady retailers. Effectively, a consumer will dispute a charge on their debit/credit card statements and the issuing bank or credit card company will forcibly return the disputed funds to the person. Exactly why and how these chargebacks were applied to the aforementioned accounts has yet to be determined, but they've caused the accounts to have negative balances with Blizzard, which has led to their suspension until the issue is resolved.

The main problem with this claim, though, is that many of the players have never used PaymentOne or signed up for the company's services; some others have, but most of their accounts with PaymentOne were used over a year ago and were canceled a while ago.

Posts in the forum thread show that Blizzard is willing to discuss the unauthorized charges, but there haven't been any definite results from pursuing this course of action yet. Even stranger, though, is multiple posts stating that users have contacted their phone companies/broadband providers and are told that they have no chargebacks on their account. A quick Google search shows this isn't the first time that allegations of fraud and unexpected charges have been leveled against the company.

Another major frustration is that PaymentOne seems unwilling to help players reach a solution that doesn't involve simply paying these unathorized charges. Posts on the thread state that they've either been hung up on when they call the company or are transferred back to Blizzard. Two calls to PaymentOne seeking a comment resulted in being placed on permahold and then being disconnected.

Thanks to reader Peter, who sent in the tip about this story.