Why I Bid $700 for a Stolen PSN Account

Right now there's no protection for that. None of the major digital services directly support transferal of licenses and most of them directly forbid it in their terms of services.

GDPR got some pressure from some of the EU members to explore the issue and GDPR itself wound up punting the ball back to individual countries for now rather than wade into digital asset protections/inheritance.

The T&C go into great detail to make sure we understand we have no rights to the account/service/product, and that they still own it at all times and can revoke it from us.

Most companies still don't even comprehend that an account to a service can be an important part of someones life. Google locking people out forever over some automated perceived issue, as though it's nothing special and not even worth a cursory glance. Meanwhile that email account could be the central point of that users entire life.

Game accounts can have a serious amount of money, time, love, and effort invested in them. I've been using the same PSN account since the service first launched. I have hundreds of digital games, DLCs, movies, etc. My entire life is also run from my email, tied to everything from paying my rent and bills to managing my kids school through their online services. In the former, I don't play online games on purpose, because I know of the risk of pissing off the wrong kid, and for the latter, I don't use a free email service and control the domain so I can redirect it. Still not perfect though.

We need to take this stuff more seriously.

Piracy is the only way I can play my legally-purchased copy of GTA V or Max Payne III. (Most of their older titles did not have mandatory Rockstar DRM like the new ones, so they are OK)

How is an account not property?

What I don't get in this scenario is how can sony deny a bought game for this person? I mean he has the receipts and he can prove that he had paid for those games. How can they deny that product to him? I understand why they would have the rights to his account but what about the games which are actual products, digital or not they should provide them to him.

> Even if you buy an account, there's no telling if you get to keep it.

What sort of person 1) has the discretionary funds to buy an account like this, 2) wants one of these accounts so badly that they will pay that kind of money for it, and 3) is so stupid as to believe that it won't be ganked back by a different hacker, or even the same one again?

In other words, WHO IS FUELING THIS ABSURDITY?! There has to be a demand side of this equation, and, from my chair, it looks like people who have WAY more money than sense. I know there's a lot of them in the world, but, still.

I've seen several headlines recently that Sony has the console crown right now, but it seems like it wouldn't take much fear mongering by Microsoft in the right places to use this as a scare tactic against PS to try to push people back to XB. I mean, sure, this particular user "won," but you can't expect Vice to do a story about everyone who gets screwed.

Just require 7+ characters and at least one number in the username and suddenly you lose 99% of "lucrative" names.

[0] https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...

At the end of the day I had to use another friend's Uber account to contact Uber and explain the situation. They disabled 2FA and let me back into my account. I suppose Uber could validate the GPS position of the driver and my phone and use that to validate my story, but I doubt they went through all that trouble :(

this is what scares me the most about using 2FA.

github for example says if 2FA is lost there is not way to recover.

i have lost a phone number before... and although github also supports other 2FA devices, such as a rotating key app which can be on multiple devices, you have to set up all devices at once. so i can put it on my laptop and my phone, but not my home and my work computer unless i carry one to the other place. phone and laptop is not enough. if i use my bag, both are gone. and i'd have to reset all devices if i ever want to add a new one. at that point i am more afraid to loose access through stupidity than through theft.

no thanks.

greetings, eMBee.

There are other potential threat models though that would require a re-enter of the 2FA code to be safe, such as cookie theft, or temporary computer compromise. Both of these though seem less likely of attacks.

This is not an insignificant consideration. Companies track support calls (call volume - and their reported reason, is monitored closely) as a matter of business. I have heard companies going back on enabling two/multi-factor auth, once realizing support volume goes up. (Which is silly, because of course it goes up compared to not if you didn't allow it before.)

Have to say, every time it worked flawlessly from the console itself.

Can't speak for the mess of Microsoft, but regarding features Sony was ahead of Microsoft for several years. But the last 1 to 2 years it feels like Microsoft is actually ahead. Things like making X360 games backwards compatible is a huge plus for me. If only all of my friends would think like that and move to the Xbox as wel :/

We do our best to apply strict and fair rules, but some cases still get evaluated on a balance of merits and history.

I can also safely say that customers who struggle to enter their date of birth consistently see 2FA schemes as an insurmountable barrier.

These are 1% issues but the volume grows linearly with user base, unlike other support issues which we can automate away or use the ecosystem to assist. I haven’t yet found a way to deal with these cases that scales any better, and I just know it’s going to be a marginal cost issue later.

(I don’t think any of this applies to the case in this article, no sympathy for Sony’s dismal support)

Game-hackers also buy the accounts so they can get around being banned from online games, but considering the price mentioned this sounds more like a big game library account.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc

ONE WEIRD TRICK - dirtbag companies HATE this - my mom (former lawyer) taught me to get any company dragging its heels or otherwise being scummy about giving you what you paid for is to basically state what you want followed by “...and if I do not get the product/service that I paid your company for, my next call will be to the State Attorneys General of the state of (where we’re from) and the state where you are incorporated, and we will be filing a claim of fraudulent business practices.”

9 times out of 10 that’ll be enough to get the gears moving. Legal compliance is almost always more expensive than fighting a customer on an issue, so they tend to give in rather quickly.