Fraud on the Sony Playstation Network SEN - you have NO rights! - ABYSMAL SERVICE

Mickey_Taker

After the big hack of 2011, and the alleged thousands of people who have been hacked since that date (just Google it), you'd think Sony would take fraud on their network a lot more seriously.

2 weeks ago - unauthorized purchases were made on my account. Sony confirmed to me after an investigation that these were indeed unauthorized and didn't come from my console. They notified me that action had been taken against the fraudster...BUT...no refund would be given to me. Leaving me £80 in the hole.

Can I challenge it? Nope. Because when you sign up, you agree that that all activity on your account is your responsibility. Fair enough...but how do we know that Sony aren't still playing loose with our details and security? We don't. And now they have a get out. Which means that any hack/fraud/abuse of your account by a 3rd party will never ever be Sony's fault or responsibility and they will not help you if you suffer.

This of course is unfair, of questionable legality, and extremely anti consumer.

The fact is, all Sony has to do is remove access to these purchases from a user's account and refund the stolen funds to the PSN wallet. Yet, they won't do this citing their 'terms of service'. They can do it, as they will refund and remove access if a download is found faulty. But they won't do it in cases of fraud. They have your money, and they don't care. For a company that supposedly puts the gamer first, this is undeniably bad service.

In my situation; my password was long, and made up of characters, numbers, and in upper/lower case. It was unique to PSN. It had never been entered in any other place other than my Vita, PS4, PC and the Playstation app. As a tech savvy person, my PC and phone are clean of malware and viruses (of course you can never say never, only an idiot would say never...but I keep on top of all threats and do everything reasonably possible to secure my data).

Regardless of who is to blame for compromised Sony accounts, Sony DEFINITELY NEEDS TO DO BETTER when responding to such cases and not simply state unfair and immoral Terms of Service. I know I am not the only one who has suffered, and I know I won't be the last.

Sony have been hacked in the past, and were fined for it. They didn't play safe with out personal data and financial details.

It is not beyond reason that this could happen again, either on a small scale or on a scale similar to that of 2011. Just google along the lines of 'my psn was hacked' etc etc. You will see the many who have suffered since 2011 (and before).

BUT...the point that we should ALL BE WORRIED ABOUT, is that whether your account being compromised is your fault or Sony's fault...it will always be YOU (the user) who suffers the blame and foots the bill.

Sony's Terms of Service now states that YOU (the user) are responsible for all activity on your account. Meaning, even if Sony are at fault, they won't admit it and YOU are always liable. Adding to that insult, Sony will do absolutely nothing to help victims of fraud on their network beyond notifying them that they have been a victim of fraud (and placing the blame squarely upon the user).

Sony's Terms of Service are therefore of questionable legality as they are unfair and one sided in favour of themselves. It also doesn't consider their responsibilities to protect the user's data. It is anti-consumer and immoral, and they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it in this day and age when cyber crime is a serious problem.

Fraud is a serious issue, and Sony should be doing everything to help it's loyal and paying customers, not simply quoting Terms of Service when problems occur.

Mickey_Taker

ps. Sorry for the long post! It's by first post, though I've been a member here for 5 years as you can see. Bit of a lurker. Just think it's really important to get this information out there and into the open so;

a) We can attempt to have something done about it.
b) Other users are aware of the situation and can try to avoid it in the future.

DCFC79

You can prevent it further by buying 1 of them pre paid cards and you enter the code.

atrixblue.-MFR-.

Some people have had success in writing to SONY UK with a letter before court action. some have had success in calling their customer service number getting hold of a manager authorized to refund and get it done that way. I do not understand why people will hold their account information on the PSN knowing it is always going to be vulnerable to attacks of hacking but people do.


anyway your best course of action is to try and get SOE uk to refund on the phone or write a letter before action.

Mickey_Taker

atrixblue.-MFR-. wrote: »

. I do not understand why people will hold their account information on the PSN knowing it is always going to be vulnerable to attacks of hacking but people do.

I had no CC info on file, it was taken from my PSN Wallet - which I topped up using pre-praid cards!

Sony won't do anything on the phone. The person I spoke too said there was no manager...then relented and said one would call me back. But, no call back in 4 days. Very bad service, feel cheated and lied to now.

Calling them seems pointless as all they do when I try to talk to them on the phone is read me the 'terms of service'. They're like robots. Unhelpful robots.

PenguinJim

Mickey_Taker wrote: »

2 weeks ago - unauthorized purchases were made on my account.

Wasn't it three weeks ago now? It was two weeks ago when you posted about it a week ago in some other places. (Sorry - I'm Captain Timeline! :A )

My favourite was this excellent "deal" you shared with the lucky users of Extra Savvy. :j

So, what have people already said to you?

Best Answer Supplied by CBEE2:

"Fraud... keep using that word if you please, but they admitted no such thing. They stated the purchases were made from a different console than the one you stated to be your own. This does not mean they believe someone hacked your account, nor does it mean they believe you didn't authorise the purchases. For all they know, you gave the account to your friend to make the purchases and ended up hating the games and now want a refund.

Sony isn't a company with just 5,000 customers so they can not afford to work in good faith in such circumstances - they have over 100,000,000 registered accounts, so what seems like an obviously fraudulent thing to you - they probably see others doing all the time for their own benefit."

There are also plenty of solutions provided in the other threads you started last week - it's a shame you didn't take the time to share them with us here to help us out. Here are a couple of copy-pastes:

"Have they got an address in England?

If they have download form N1 from small claims court, fill it in and print it out. Write a letter explaining what has happened and say if this is not rectified in 10 working days this court paperwork gets submitted.

Send the letter and form N1 to them special delivery & wait..."
"Yeah, write to -

SCEE
Complaints Department
13 Great Marlborough Street
London
W1F 7HP

Try and include as much info as possible from phone calls you've made to Sony to how long you've been a Playstation gamer."

Don't pretend you didn't see them, Mickey, as you responded to them originally. They are good answers and you could have helped people in the same situation here by sharing them, instead of just posting a shameless, whiny rant.

Mickey_Taker

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But, let's go through your points shall we...

- three weeks ago today. Not 3 weeks when I posted the original post in this thread.

- I posted my dissatisfaction in many forums, yes.

- Upon receiving the postal address, I found on another forum that Sony were not responding to such letters anymore. It is always best to give them a chance to respond via the usual means. A 'bull in a china shop' approach wouldn't be the best thing for me going forward. As such I continued with the regular support channels and emailed the head of customer relations. I am currently awaiting his response.

- 'correct legal definition' - I find this hilarious and really shows your level of knowledge and ineptitude. People offering me advice have rarely used the correct legal definitions. Certainly not the ones you are talking about. Many terms have been used, you are picking one person's response and taking it as gospel? Why. I don't know. Maybe you're gullible. Who knows.

- As mentioned earlier. I have posted on many forums and received a mountain of conflicting advice. Write to them. Email execs. Try support again - speak to manager. Instigate a money claim. Just because you haven't seen this advice, doesn't mean I haven't received it.

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Flyonthewall

Mickey_Taker wrote: »

- As mentioned earlier. I have posted on many forums and received a mountain of conflicting advice. Write to them. Email execs. Try support again - speak to manager. Instigate a money claim. Just because you haven't seen this advice, doesn't mean I haven't received it.

That's not conflicting advice, that's many good suggestions of what you can do in this situation. So start with the easiest - try support again. If no luck, write to them. You have the address. Failing that, email execs and take the issue higher.

Like it or not, the comment from CBEE2 is correct.

Mickey_Taker

Flyonthewall wrote: »

That's not conflicting advice, that's many good suggestions of what you can do in this situation. So start with the easiest - try support again. If no luck, write to them. You have the address. Failing that, email execs and take the issue higher.

Like it or not, the comment from CBEE2 is correct.

CBEE2 isn't right. Just read it again. He's more or less saying that because Sony is so big, and I am merely an individual...I should just take what they are saying/doing. That I have no choice. Someone else using your account on their console is fraud. Sony said someone else purchased games on my account and action has been taken against them. If there was no fraud, why would they do this? Just because he provided a scenario in which I was possibly some kind of scammer myself, doesn't make it true. He was shot down on the other forum anyway for this comment.

The conflicting advice is clear. It contradicts. 'Ring. Don't ring.' W'rite, don't write.' etc etc. Clearly conflicting.

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PenguinJim

Mickey_Taker wrote: »

The conflicting advice is clear. It contradicts. 'Ring. Don't ring.' W'rite, don't write.' etc etc. Clearly conflicting.

At the risk of repeating myself, who said "don't write"? Can you link to the source, please? If Sony are no longer responding to letters, that's very HELPFUL information that you should have posted your first post here, as well as going back to those threads where writing a letter was the best solution and updating those so that people weren't wasting time and money on those letters.

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Flyonthewall

Mickey_Taker wrote: »

CBEE2 isn't right. Just read it again. He's more or less saying that because Sony is so big, and I am merely an individual...I should just take what they are saying/doing. That I have no choice. Someone else using your account on their console is fraud. Sony said someone else purchased games on my account and action has been taken against them. If there was no fraud, why would they do this? Just because he provided a scenario in which I was possibly some kind of scammer myself, doesn't make it true. He was shot down on the other forum anyway for this comment.

"Certainly agree with this comment however it is unacceptable. I suggest calling them in person, much more convenient than typing long email responses and getting no where."
joshp

Oooh, yeah, it was totally shot down.

One person questioned whether that made it ok, but the poster never said it made it ok.

The poster was simply making a point that Sony is a big company and they get people saying things like this all the time. It's not obviously fraud to them because they get so many cases of people saying that when it's not true. They have a lot of customers so losing one who, in their eyes, may be trying to scam them anyway is no big deal.

That's not to say it is ok - it's not. But that's why you need to contact them in other ways. Keep contacting them, push harder to get a result, and they'll see you're not just a scammer and they should look into your individual case. The poster never said you have no choice or accept it, they just pointed out how it currently looks to Sony.

Other post says,"our investigation concluded that the serial number of the console on which these transactions were made does not match the serial number of the console you provided to us on your original call."

That doesn't mean they admitted fraud. You could easily have used a different console yourself.

It does odd though that your account was hacked considering how careful you claim to have been over keeping it secure and I've not seen any other posts regarding hacking. Why just go after your account and how did they get the details? I highly doubt Sony is selling details on or anything silly - they wouldn't just hack your account if Sony were selling on details anyway.

Also I'm pretty sure it's always been the case that you are responsible for your own account because...well, it's your account! That's not to say Sony isn't responsible for keeping details safe, they are. But you have a responsibility too. Sony admitted when they were hacked before so clearly they're happy to take responsibility.

The conflicting advice is clear. It contradicts. 'Ring. Don't ring.' W'rite, don't write.' etc etc. Clearly conflicting.

Well ignore the don't comments and do all the things that have been suggested one at a time. If one fails, try the next. It's not going to hurt is it.

The only reason people will be saying don't do that, do this is down to personal experience of what worked for them in contacting Sony, but people have different experiences.

I imagine most is also opinion than an order.

For example,
"Ring."
"Nah, I wouldn't bother ringing, writing worked for me."

Doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't ring, just that they personally wouldn't bother.