Where did Account Bound item come from

Question

While in the Sell window of the Gold Auction House, I noticed an item in my stash, which appeared in red and could not be sold. It was amongst some other items, which I received in-game from another player. I did recently re-arrange items in my stash, so it could have been moved from elsewhere in the stash.

When I looked at the item in-game, it appeared as an "Account Bound" item. This means that it was crafted by me sometime? Could the other player have given me an Account Bound item? He just dropped items on the ground for me to pick up -- we didn't trade them officially.

Answer 1

No, the other player couldn't give you an Account Bound item. Neither could you pick up somebody else's Account Bound item.

There are 4 ways you could have one of them:

• You crafted it (Hellfire Rings, Shoulders, Amulets, Bracers, Marquise gems, Portal Devices, etc.)
• You inserted a Marquise gem into an item that made it Account bound due to the gem. If you will remove the gem, this item will become normal again(unless it was crafted as in the first point)
• You found it from some monster(Keys, blacksmith plan for Portal Device, various ingredients for Staff of Herding)
• You bought it from an NPC(bell for Staff of Herding, blacksmith recipes for various difficulties of Staff of Herding, blacksmith recipe for Hellfire Ring, etc.)

Hope it helps

EDIT

Totally forgot about one more way to get an Account Bound item. If you have a special version of the game(Collectors Edition for example), you will be granted 3 Account Bound items:

• Angelic Wings
• Bottled Cloud
• Bottled Smoke

It seems like you can also get some exclusive items by registering special versions of other Blizzard games, but I do not have any information about it

Answer 2

Blizzard may also bind items to your account if someone reports an account was hacked and Blizzard does a rollback.

If you haven't logged in for a while, they were binding items on account during the gold dupe incident.