[S4L] The Truth behind -WinningRoad.

The truth behind the silent and sudden demise behind one of S4’s most renowned clans. A tale of betrayal, corrupt staff and unpaid volunteers that rocked the Netsphere despite attempts from former host alaplaya to silence it by immediately deleting all threads that were published on the matter and banning the users who posted them.

April 3.

WinningRoad clan master -WnR.Neluro got his account “stolen”. All of the items in his equipment were dropped, his nickname got changed to NeluroGoesPen, and the clan leadership was given to a freshly made account called -WnR.IVI (aka IVIaestroChief/Shinzu).

For those who don’t know much, Neluro’s account was probably THE most valuable account in the entire game: max level, Full Premium equipment, and with an unique OP Crown accessory (won from the Supersonic tournament); leader of THE most important clan called WinningRoad: the number one for a long time, the clan that has won the highest amount of tournaments in S4 history, and one of the 11 clans to ever receive a custom clan mark in the game (won from the Burning Aim Tournament).

So, how did IVI manage to hijack Neluro’s account?
To be honest, Nelu was one of the few WnR members who didn’t share his account with anyone, or at the very least, I know he would’ve been very careful with it, so let’s exclude account sharing.
Nelu wasn’t a cheater either, he wasn’t that kind of player that downloads hacktools like many high leveled players do, so the “he got a keylogger” theory is to be excluded, his ass is as clean as a whistle.
The thief managed to “recover” Nelu’s account by writing an account recovery ticket to ala’s support, containing many of Nelu’s personal information, such as the ID, birthday date, payments, and all the information needed to recover an account. How the heck did he get all that info?
With the help of a German GM

Everyone should know that Game Masters are able to see the account information of any player (except the password), our logs basically, this is what happened, it’s the only explanation. The thief is befriended with a GM who disclosed personal information of an account under request of the thief.

IVI already told us that he was going to hack our clan months ago with account recovery, but we didn’t really pay attention to that lol.
At the moment, all of IVI’s accounts are permabanned for what has happened, including the current fake leader of WinningRoad. Good job alaplaya, problem solved. Wait what, WTF IS THIS? No, nothing is solved. Nelu got his account back but all of items are gone and it’s freaking permabanned too. We didn’t get our clan back either. The corrupted GM most probably, still works for alaplaya.

You messed up alaplaya. You messed up very badly, and banning one guy isn’t enough to fix all the problems. You must give to Neluro his account back with all the stuff he had. I’ve heard of accounts being rolled back in the past for “farm”. So it’s possible. Staff members nowdays get free max lvl accounts with the specific GM set, so you can restore Nelu’s items with no problem, DO IT.
The clan WinningRoad still exists technically at the moment, but it’s “on hiatus” since, like I said its fake leader is permabanned. You managed to fix the old epic top 10 clan hack, so you are perfectly capable of doing a simple task, such as giving to ME the freaking WinningRoad leadership.

“zomg hara go write a tickettt”
Shut up, I want to discuss about this openly with the staff, I want to warn everyone about the stealing potential of account recovery, I want to warn everyone that they should have a lvl 0 account as clan master instead of using your main one for security reasons if it’s an important clan.
They did NOT answer to our tickets.

Morale of the story: Try to use a different username/email/password for every game you play. “Privacy” is a big word on paper, but corruption can and will occur anywhere. Especially in games which are hell-bent on maximizing profits and “hire” volunteer staff members to cut down costs.

/edit: Four months after the publication of this article, we received the following message (see below).

By the way, the clan WinningRoad was restored about 3 months ago, same for the clan leader. Ala did something decent! Well, half decent. Because right now, if you search ingame the clan WinningRoad, you still see the name of the hacker guy as clan master even though it’s not, same for the old clan descriptions Lol.