PSN Hacked

[Iceglow]

I found out the other day that Microsoft has been ripping $9.99 a month out of my account that I don't use for the last two years (while my 360 was sitting on a closet shelf collecting dust). I never authorized it, and only provided my card information for the initial free trial back in 2007 I think, and yet, for some reason, they didn't start taking my money until 2009. I only found out because my bank notified me that I only had $3.00 left in the account.

So no matter how much Sony screws up, I still hate Microsoft more; they stole from me intentionally.

Ok first up I'm going to call bull here for several reasons:

XBL is charged at £39.99 for 12 months, £14.99 for 3 months and at £5.99 per month (obviously this means buying it at 12 months is much better value for the consumer, ironically last time I checked in the USA it was $39.99, $14.99 and $5.99 respectively) therefore your claim of they've taken $9.99 out per month for the last 5 years or so for XBL is bull. Also of note, XBL has only been purchasable by the individual month since this year prior to this it was purchased only in 3 or 12 month time frames. Automatic renewal is a bitch yes, however your email account registered for your XBL Gamertag will receive numerous warnings that the XBL Gold membership is running out. These emails considering they must be received by a Microsoft email address they are never junked by the filter so you would have noticed this prior to the time when you claim you found out.

Secondly, you have never ever been forced by Microsoft to register your credit/debit card details on the signing up for XBL membership, especially not trial membership. If you wish to purchase something either directly over the xbox.com webpage or xbox dashboard then sure, your credit or debit card details will be asked for and more importantly stored by the console (these are simple to delete in system settings meaning no access would be made possible) or you will be offered the choice of inserting a redemption key allowing you to get the goods be it points or membership without having to give over card details, points and xbl membership can be purchased in many locations throughout the globe such as gamestop or even walmart. As I pointed out, you've never been forced to give over your card details, I've been signed up for XBL for a good few years and for the first 2 or so I never once put any credit/debit card details on the account, namely because for that period of time I didn't own a credit or debit card.

Thirdly, how credit taking from your account works is essentially one of 3 ways:

1) Direct debit, this involves them sending through a contract you sign and send back to them, this allows them to contact your bank and request that they send them the allotted amount each and every month. You would know if you had done this. Once the contract is up the Direct Debit would be suspended a simple phone call asking your bank to cancel the direct debit at any time would prevent any money leaving your account.

2) A standing order, these are similar to a direct debit except to set one up you've gotta do so yourself there is no contract per-se except that you've told your bank that this money needs to go to this account on this day, most people if renting accommodation use a standing order for this. To cancel the standing order you would probably have to visit a branch to do so since 90% of the time you need to provide a signature to do so or cancel it through online banking. However, you could find out that there was one of these on any accounts you hold easily, either calling the bank, logging in to online banking or reading your bank statement would definitely show the money going out. You'd definitely remember setting this up.

3) Repeat ordering, whereby you give permission to the company to repeatedly purchase an item for you based the same way you do any other online transaction. I would probably avoid letting any company do this even if you trust them. However a simple setting the option to allow automatic renewal to no will be fine, also this would have happened from 2007 not 2009. You'd have noticed it, checking a bank statement or an online banking report would have shown this up.

If you are this ignorant of your finances that you cannot be bothered to check your bank report/statement then frankly you cannot claim a company willfully stole from you because you're lying, you were just too damn ignorant to actually check what you were spending cash on. It's not like Microsoft decided to say "hmm this customer hasn't logged in for over 2 years, lets see how much cash we can make before he notices mwhahahahaha" No, sorry but stupid claim to make. Microsoft makes more cash in an hour than I care to figure out, they're not going to miss you paying $9.99 a month or based on an average of 30 days a month $0.013875 an hour. Your ignorance and stupidity not to see something coming out of your account over the course of the last 24 months doesn't make it theft, thats one of the most retarded claims I have ever heard.

So yeah sorry DMKA I'm calling bull on you for multiple reasons, Microsoft definitely didn't steal from you but if you're stupid or ignorant enough to leave a renewal order leaving your account for 2 years and claim you have had now knowledge of the debit from your account then frankly I'm not going to lie, you probably deserve it. On the plus side for you; whilst you continuously forgive Sony for yet more smurf ups and for losing your personal details and putting you at risk of serious identity fraud (which, even without the credit card details is enough) at least if the story you've spun in the above quote isn't a complete fabrication you can bring your 360 out of the closet and play online games on it.

For the benefit of Loony BoB, I have also seen reports and such which claim Sony stored details in plain text unencrypted on their servers. Of course this is all rumour there may be no truth to this in the slightest. I will say however that this is definitely a result of incompetence on the behalf of Sony, the trade of between security and usability does have to be made but I feel that if Sony had spent more money on developing the PSN rather than making as much money from it to recoup losses of building their consoles they wouldn't be in such a mess. This is why I don't complain about the payment for XBL, Microsoft rightfully imho channel the majority of the proceeds of XBL membership payments back in to the development, update and maintenance and security of XBL. They mostly make profit on XBL through the sale of points used to purchase films, avatar items and DLC. If Sony had been bold enough to follow suit maybe the PSN wouldn't now be such a weak link in Sony's marketing (even a fool must see the loss of 77million users data is going to look bad and hurt Sony) I feel especially sorry for anyone who owns the PSP Go console, they cannot get any new titles for their console during this fiasco.

[Slothy]

You realize that mistakes do happen with companies all of the time and customers can end up billed unusual amounts without actually doing anything right Iceglow? I've seen it happen with cell phone customers all the time. I'm not going to say you're wrong about any of the info you gave about XBL (since I don't have a 360 and can't be bothered to look any of it up), but I'm not inclined to believe that DMKA is simply making it up. Could be an error on Microsoft's part, or perhaps DMKA mixed up some of the details, but calling him a liar and basically acting like a douche is pretty uncalled for, especially before he's had the chance to respond to what you said.

[Iceglow]

The amount doesn't fit, the time frame doesn't fit, the fact that it was a 2 year delay and a 2 year period. Frankly, if you earn so little your bank balance can hit a mere $3.00 then you'd notice $9.99 every month for 24 months. 1 or 2 months I could understand, I could also see that being a mistake such as is sometimes made with cell phone companies but to say 1) he didn't notice such a mistake and 2) didn't notice anything at all was amiss for 2 whole years, nearly 2.5 years...

I'm sure I'm not the only one who can't see that happening. That being said, if this was a mistake on Microsoft's part, a simple call to their american customer support team would see a full refund on the whole thing, again Microsoft would not have intentionally stolen from DMKA so my points stand. I'm not really acting like a douche, I'm merely pointing out the massive flaw in his story.

Still the topic of the thread is the PSN getting hacked, and yeah basically as said, this is a massively incompetent show by Sony their handling of this situation has in effect been worse than the fact that they reckon the details of their 77million members got stolen. They should have come clean and told their members and their fans what the situation was as soon as they knew and I don't believe for one second it took them over a week to discover the level of risk their customers was under.

[Skyblade]

Currently I'm wondering which will come first, PSN coming back up or the DLC codes I have for Dissidia Duodecim expiring. The codes only last until the end of 2012, after all.

Plus, I want to pick up Xenogears and Parasite Eve. Stupid Sony.

[Dignified Pauper]

I meant intel the shortened form of intelligence, not the company there. I guess I didn't want to use the word 'rumour', because this is very likely the case.

I read that the information was SENT as plain text, but was stored through encryption, over at Penny Arcade. I can't find the original link they had posted though. Their threads grow so fast.

[Rostum]

Looks like some dude got screwed over.

[Wolf Kanno]

Though the report does say they are not sure if the credit fraud was related to the PSN breach. Its pretty scary how easy it is to get nailed with identity theft, so this could simply be coincidence.

[Freya]

I didn't even know all this was happening until a bunch of customers were asking if we knew when it was coming back up at work today. Heh, i'm a bad salesperson cause I had no idea wtf they were talking about.

[Dreddz]

I can't help but feel this is all being blown out of proportion. Stuff like this happens all the time. Sites like Kotaku are just using scare tactics for hits. Heck, some sites are saying this is the end of Playstation. Sony are a professional company and if there was a real concern over credit card details being leaked then they would absolutely warn us, simply to cover their own asses.

I do feel kind of disconnected from all of this seeing as I haven't had a working PS3 for months. I would take my credit card details off PSN but I can't be assed. What a fearless bastard I am.

[Loony BoB]

For what it's worth, if you think that Microsoft are incapable of having emails sent to spam folders, you're wrong there. I've had it happen before when I applied for a preview of their latest Outlook software when I was testing it out. The Microsoft email went straight to my spam folder. It's happened with Virgin Media, Scottish Power and British Gas, too. I don't know how Yahoo!'s spam filter works, but once every six or so months I notice something in my spam folder that shouldn't be there. I'm sure no MS emails will be diverted on Hotmail, though

DMKA's situation does seem extremely odd, though. I agree that if you are paying something monthly that you don't want then you should stop it within a month or two, not a year or two. If it's an account you never use and you honestly feel they stole from you intentionally, you should take it up with them or a consumer rights specialist.

In all honesty, despite what's gone on I would still happily use PSN ahead of XBL any day. If Danielle and I had been paying for XBL since the day I got a 360, we'd be about £400-£720 worse off. That's a massive amount of money guaranteed to be gone as opposed to the possibility of my credit card being used by a fraudster, something which I would be compensated for, leaving me at £0 worse off regardless. Yes, my information has probably been compromised, but the financial effects are likely to be nil as opposed to XBL which is guaranteed to make me lose money. Basically, while it's annoying, it's worrying and I have to be careful with my finances (I always am anyway) and the like, I've still 'saved' hundreds of pounds by cancelling my Xbox Live subscriptions. If people regularly use XBL and pay for it, power to them, it's obviously their choice to say it's worth it. I prefer using that money for Sky Sports. =x

[Old Manus]

Okay, apparently CC details were stored encrypted, but everything else was plaintext.

[Loony BoB]

The annoying thing is that I honestly can't remember which password I used or the security question, so I don't know which passwords I should change online. But then, I can't imagine they will get that much of a thrill out of hacking into my AIM account. My Y!Mail and EoFF account have unique passwords anyway, so I should be safe...

[Depression Moon]

Oh man I didn't know this hack was something serious. What precautions should I take?

[Loony BoB]

While it's unlikely that it will be you that they will target, you may as well take precautions. You should probably keep a close eye on your bank accounts (but then, all people should always do this) and if you use the same password for PSN as you do for other vital things such as your bank account or your email account, I would suggest changing the password for these things, too.

Also, move house.

[Psychotic]

To the PS3 users who up every 360 thread on Eyes on with their irrelevant chest-thumping MY CONSOLE IS BETTAR crap (you know who you are): heh maybe you shouldve bought a 360

To the PS3 users who don't: That is awful, and it just goes to show how vulnerable our personal information really is. I hope it all works out okay for you guys and nothing untoward happens with your details.