For about seven years, I worked in fraud prevention for an online based company. We dealt with financials, not game accounts, but I feel the general concept is pretty similar. This wasn't a small company, by the way. It was and is a multi billion dollar business with hundreds of millions of account holders. We had an automated system that would restrict accounts when it thought they were participating in fraudulent activity. I worked in the department that reviewed the restricted accounts for potential reinstatement. So, that being established, I feel that I can offer a bit of insight here.
Like I used to tell pissed off people on the phone, "this was done by an automated system, and, as we all know, no automated system is flawless." False positives do happen, no matter how good the automated system is. Occasionally, our system would restrict a massive number of accounts, many of which were false positives. When that happened, we didn't ignore the pattern - quite the opposite. The affected accounts were collected and manually reviewed to determine whether or not they fit the criteria of the alleged fraudulent activity we had suspected in the first place.
Now, I can't say for sure that is how Blizzard operates, but it seems likely. When you appeal a restriction (or in this case a permanent ban that you feel was unfounded), it's probably queued up to a human being who reviews the account's activity. The decision can depend on a lot of things. It can depend on the person reviewing it and their level of training, whether or not there has been a problem recognized with the batch of accounts that were restricted or banned, and, of course, the account's activity. Some people might be willing to give the account owner the benefit of the doubt, and some might not.
Despite all of that, I worked in fraud prevention and talked to liars for long enough to realize that most of the time people are full of it. Even so, I tried to give people the benefit of the doubt when I thought they had either made an honest mistake or were being honest with me.
TL;DR - believe it or not, there's a human element to this work. And sometimes, automated systems screw up. That's what the people are there for.
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For about seven years, I worked in fraud prevention for an online based company. We dealt with financials, not game accounts, but I feel the general concept is pretty similar. This wasn't a small company, by the way. It was and is a multi billion dollar business with hundreds of millions of account holders. We had an automated system that would restrict accounts when it thought they were participating in fraudulent activity. I worked in the department that reviewed the restricted accounts for potential reinstatement. So, that being established, I feel that I can offer a bit of insight here.
Like I used to tell pissed off people on the phone, "this was done by an automated system, and, as we all know, no automated system is flawless." False positives do happen, no matter how good the automated system is. Occasionally, our system would restrict a massive number of accounts, many of which were false positives. When that happened, we didn't ignore the pattern - quite the opposite. The affected accounts were collected and manually reviewed to determine whether or not they fit the criteria of the alleged fraudulent activity we had suspected in the first place.
Now, I can't say for sure that is how Blizzard operates, but it seems likely. When you appeal a restriction (or in this case a permanent ban that you feel was unfounded), it's probably queued up to a human being who reviews the account's activity. The decision can depend on a lot of things. It can depend on the person reviewing it and their level of training, whether or not there has been a problem recognized with the batch of accounts that were restricted or banned, and, of course, the account's activity. Some people might be willing to give the account owner the benefit of the doubt, and some might not.
Despite all of that, I worked in fraud prevention and talked to liars for long enough to realize that most of the time people are full of it. Even so, I tried to give people the benefit of the doubt when I thought they had either made an honest mistake or were being honest with me.
TL;DR - believe it or not, there's a human element to this work. And sometimes, automated systems screw up. That's what the people are there for.