286-day-playtime character deleted on Christmas

Whoever writes this blog is saying that his 3/8 Tier 3, full GM, level 60 human Warlock, with over 6,800 hours played, was deleted from his account by means of a stolen password, and on December 25th, no less. He tells a fairly compelling story. He contacted Blizzard as soon as he found his character missing, assuming it was an error on their part; they got back to him and said his password had probably been compromised via a phishing scam. Our protagonist looked back in his email and found a likely candidate from December 23rd that had asked him to "update his credit card info".

Understandably ticked off, and apparently possessing considerable financial resources, he hired an investigative firm to look into the matter and track down whoever had done this to him. (On a side note, why would the scammer want to delete the character? I can see why he'd want to steal the character's gold, but deleting a character is just sadistic.) He now plans on finding a lawyer and suing this scammer for, presumably, whatever he can get out of him (the blogger hopes for prison time, but that seems unlikely to me; however, IANAL).

There's some interesting commentary on the story over at digg. It's fairly mean-spirited, like most digg comment threads, but it still raises a few good points. What do you guys think? Did this guy deserve what he got for being rich and/or ignorant of phishing scams? Personally, I don't think anyone deserves to have their toys taken away just for being unknowledgeable. And how about that giant playtime, eh?

One more point that just occurred to me: legally, I believe, we players don't own our characters -- Blizzard does. So how much of a case does he have for destruction of property or whatever? I could be wrong, though. I'm currently trudging through the EULA (do I sense a weekly feature in the making? ;).