This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com.

Hacked! It is not fun, and it happens more than anyone would like to admit. Gear, gold and pride, all pilfered by some stranger.

One of the sadder parts of this job is reporting on the numerous scams that sweep across the World of Warcraft landscape. It's no secret that your WoW account is valuable to thieves -- the entire gold-selling industry is built on a foundation of hacked accounts and stolen items.

Their latest scam vehicle? Our inherent desire for sparkle ponies. Let's get two things straight off the bat:

Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server.

Recently, Polar over at Securing WoW wrote about the latest phishing email being sent out by scammers. Account thieves are using the 2010 Arena Tournament as a way to lure you to their site to steal your login info.

Blizzard appears to be cleaning house in preparation for its StarCraft II release as well as its Battle.net revamp.

In any discussion concerning botting, farming, hacking, or gold-buying, someone inevitably makes the argument that Blizzard should cut out the middlemen and sell gold to players themselves. I wanted to use this article to explain why this would not necessarily be a good idea.

One of our readers, Bill, sent us a tip about a WoW account issue on The Consumerist. It seems that the ownership of Anonymous's friend's account is under dispute and Blizzard won't let him use it in the meantime.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Account Security

There are so many scams going around like the Catclysm Alpha invite and the WoW Armory phishing site, that people's accounts are getting stolen more than ever.