Just in time for the Real Cash Auction House.
A Community Manager over at the Diablo 3 Official Forums announced,
We recently issued a round of account suspensions and bans to several thousand Diablo® III players who were in violation of the Battle.net® Terms of Use for cheating and/or using botting or hacking programs while playing. In addition to undermining the spirit of fair play that’s essential to everyone’s enjoyment of the game, botting, hacking, and other such exploitive behavior can contribute to stability and performance issues with the Battle.net service. As always, maintaining a stable, safe, and fun online-gaming experience for legitimate players is a top priority for us, and we'll be continuing to keep watch on Battle.net and take action as needed.
This was in response to exploitations concerning item duplication and accounts being hacked somehow and being emptied of their loot etc.
The item duplication seems to have originated from the Diablo 3 Asian Servers. This could not have come at a better time as the Real Cash Auction House is starting to go live across countries. The exploitations were never officially announced in the hotfixes and patches released recently by Blizzard in an attempt to reduce the spread of the known vulnerability.
I am almost 100% certain they have patched and/or monitor accounts in such a way to make the Real Cash Auction House successful, otherwise Blizzard would have put the Auction House back on the drawing board to prevent people from getting ripped off.
Hopefully Blizzard can keep pace with how popular cheating in Diablo 3 is as Blizzard has also announced they have made it a top priority to prevent cheating and hacking.
Reddit
