stay online untill you first get the broken red chain. then wait for the message'No response for blabla seconds" something like that.. And then exit to join another server (what else can you do?). seem like one out of every bunch of times this results in a clean wipe. ive had this 3 times.

ive had to restart 5 times by now. 3 wernt my own fault. one i was killed by someone :( (i hate you!!) and one time i broke my legs in the middle of nowhere.

AWESOME game even without vehicles. but i cant wait to be able to store things for later use even if i am dead. then this issue wouldnt be that bad as you could back up some things in case of sudden character wiping..

game is super awesome. GTA had the same problems at first with losing profiles. it was also because connection to the servers were lost.
In their case whenever you went online and couldnt see your character, it was because you couldnt load it from the server. so you had the option to start as a new player. If you did so. that would overwrite your old character. if you went back out of the menu and went back into the menu until connection was set up tho, you could load your main character again. Maybe this is the same problem?

A possible solution (if that were the problem) would be to always check in the main menu what your character looks like. if you got all your stuff you can continue playing. if you dont have you stuff DONT log on to another server untill you can see your main character... atleast then people would know how to protect themselfs from this. GREAT WORK PEOPLE!