🔒 Account Break-ins

In late June, a small number of (mostly inactive) accounts were broken into and stripped of everything they owned.

Every one of these break-ins happened the same way, through the lost-password flow. If there's one thing to take from this, it's to change your email password and use one you don't use anywhere else, because a compromised inbox is keys to all of your digital accounts.

Once they were in, they emptied the account. They listed everything in the account's own shop for a single point and bought it through throwaway alts, then moved on to the next account. We caught it, froze the accounts doing the buying after an investigation (and ensuring they didn't have access to any more accounts), and reset the passwords on the accounts that were broken into so they couldn't be touched again.

Then we went back through the shop logs and rebuilt, item by item, exactly what left each account. Everyone who was hit is getting a fresh copy of everything that was taken. Stolen gift cards come back as Cash Shop Credits rather than new cards, credited straight to the account. You can see your own list on the returned items page.

One honest note about custom wearables. Most of the stolen items had already been resold, at fair prices, to players who had no idea they were buying stolen goods. There were thousands of those sales, and unwinding them would only turn thousands of innocent buyers into new victims. So we left those purchases alone and gave the original owners fresh copies instead. That does mean a handful of custom wearables now exist in slightly larger numbers than they did before. Returning people's items is worth that to us, and I would make the same call again.

If you were affected and something still looks missing after all this, open a ticket and we'll help as soon as we can.

July 16, 2026, 5:35 pm by Targaryen
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Wow, this is scary! I am so glad staff traced them down and caught the thieves/hackers. That is awesome that staff replaced all the stolen items. I guess it is time to redo my password to be safe. I always try to use two step verification on all my accounts. Good job staff.

July 16, 2026, 5:34 pm by Marlboro
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I did notice a crazy amount of purchases from my shop by the same username that now it's frozen..

July 16, 2026, 5:32 pm by Keith
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We're pretty sure this is a user across virtual pet sites doing the same thing, so I think just... likes doing this :/

July 16, 2026, 5:25 pm by Dragonlord_Saerval
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Yikes, I can't believe people have the time on their hands and the cruelty in their hearts to do this sort of thing. I'm glad the team caught it and are handling it so well! Like others have said, I wonder why they did it? It's not like they can gain any real word money or resources from this, what's in it for them??

July 16, 2026, 5:22 pm by Searchname
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I wonder if the point wasn't simply to wreck other people's good times- someone (s) with a grudge against the site, the owner or the users. Or just jerks who get their jollies wrecking things for other folk, like how people do swatting and what not out in life, or the old school yard bully who felt like they were big beccause they made others small. Regardless, changing passwords regularly and making sure the email one is strong and unique is good practice. Thanks for letting us know what was going on!

July 16, 2026, 5:18 pm by BoaConstrictor
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Why would people do this? I don't get it. If they are normal users, they are bound to get caught and lose everything. If they are strangers, who are able to hack e-mail accounts, it makes even less sense to brake into a game. Surely they must have better ways to "become a rich Subetan" fast and rather have other goals in life. This is just sick; but so is much of the world around me nowadays and it's getting worse by the day...

I'm sorry, staff had so much work and hassle on top of everything else :-(

July 16, 2026, 5:14 pm by MegaRose
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It's bizarre that someone would go through so much effort for rare items and customs when there's no way to turn that into profit IRL. It would have to be someone who knows and cares about rarity and distribution of virtual items but somehow doesn't care about stealing from other users, and is dumb enough to think they wouldn't be caught. Like, what could the best result of their actions have possibly been? It's pointless.

July 16, 2026, 5:07 pm by PeachGoblin
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Wow, very scary. Glad you guys were able to get the items back to users affected. Thank you so much to staff for all the hours spent making things right.

Now, could bad people stop messing with stuff so y'all can focus on the fun things instead?

July 16, 2026, 5:07 pm by artichao
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wow, i was noticing a bunch of rarer items would have crazy decreased prices (half price or more) according to its 'recent price' but those numbers weren't showing up on shop autopricers nor shop search. i'd check some on the item directory and see some items had sold for 1 sP. i thought i was going crazy or that the systems had a glitch!!

thank you for doing what you could for those affected, even if some inactive players may never return. their accounts deserve to stay exactly how they left them, precious items and all!

July 16, 2026, 5:03 pm by Keith
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This is the largest scale one of these that we've had in a long time, potentially ever (the exact numbers are on the returned items page) and it took a lot of time and effort to roll back these purchases and changes, both from myself and the entire user administration team. days of pouring through logs, trying to make sure that we were connecting all of the dots and had all of the right information for users, and then building out an entire system to be able to return those items to everyone.

I know it's going to be frustrating that there are extra duplicates of some custom wearables out there -many were deleted on the accounts that were still there, but there were many that had to be created from thin air.

July 16, 2026, 5:03 pm by Allegria
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That's a surprisingly large amount of crime for something that isn't going to make any real difference in the lives of those committing it.

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