My WoW account was hacked !!!

I logged of last night just after ten, a fairly average run on Azjol Nerub having just occupied the last two hours and logged out from my beloved WoW account (playing since beta - over 150 days of play time on existing characters - 9 in total).
I logged in this morning to have a quick look at my auctions before work and straight away one of my characters isn't showing.... I know it's only a game, but a feeling of cold dread started to creep up on me - quickly logging in to one of my characters I straight away knew there was a problem, I was in a different location and some items of gear were clearly missing (epics of course), a quick check of my bags revealed pretty much empty and the 1600 gold on this character was gone!
Now that was annoying (understatement), but then I got logged out and I just knew the hacker was still in my account and I'd probably kicked them by logging on, so I logged back in again only be kicked again 20 seconds later! Then started a 10 minute battle of logging in and getting disconnected, my character in a slightly different location each time I logged back in while I quickly changed my e-mail on BattleNet - finally logging in with a new password and hopefully banishing the scum sucking hacker for good.
The damage was horrendous, but could have been worse - one of my main crafting characters was deleted (bizarrely this one had high level guild bank access but they hadn't taken anything) and four of my highest level characters (2x 80's and 2x 70+) had been been completely cleaned out, about 4000G and whole host of epics and banks full of mats (I'd been saving up for transmutes and skilling up).
A quick GM ticket later and Blizzard are working to fix my issues, whether I'll get the deleted character back, and all my items and gold we'll have to see - so fingers crossed and temper currently held until I know what's happening.
My account was hacked by a new key-logger, my AV now finds it but in the few days while it was new it sailed past my AV (from a free games sites accessed by my the kids I believe), obviously a fairly professional set-up and quite a lot of effort to get my gold.
But it did get me to thinking, if you do buy wow gold from web-site, where has it come from ? I'm guessing there's a fair number of these sites that get their money from hacks and other illegal behaviour - so you might be getting some easy gold, but some other player has suffered hard for it, maybe think about that the next time you see cheap gold advertised. ( I do wholly support abusing gold sellers btw)

Just a final note, this blog is actually written by a couple of different people who share a few things, we're early-middle-aged(ish) and keen gamers with probably 50+ years of gaming between us - we're not paid by anyone to write this, we do it because we love gaming and the activities that surround it and we're interested in the whole web 2.0 experience.
So don't think that this is some Blizzard sponsored rant about evil gold sellers, it's someone who has friends who have bought gold and also used power levelling services, I don't judge them, that's their choice but it's not for me. But it's quite clear that other gamers are being ripped off for the few who want to take short-cuts, now whether or not this is fuelled by the long term grind created by the game itself and it's focus on success driven by items and gold rather than individual skill is perhaps a blog for another day.
I'll post an update on how the recovery process goes later, for now, I'm out of here
The Dog