I woke up this morning to find I had 12 unread emails, which is quite a lot more than usual. I trudged through several offers for "final Black Friday" sales to find that, early this morning, someone added $140 in funds to my wallet on the PSN (I already had $10 in there), and used that $150 to buy points in FIFA14. I have never played a FIFA game. I changed my password and then I called Sony's support line (800-345-7669, if anyone else has this issue, might be US only). They asked me a couple of account information questions, then questions about my last legitimate purchases, how old my PS3 & PS4 were, and so on. I explained the situation ("uh yeah I did not buy $150 worth of items for a game I do not own or intend to ever own") After that the person I spoke to said that they would be putting in a refund request, to be processed in 5 to 7 business days; the money would go back into my wallet and she could leave a note to have it returned to my bank account (which I wanted). After that she tried to sell me a protection plan but I've learned from my days at Best Buy that you get in trouble if you don't try to sell it so I wasn't too mean when I turned it down. v: While I was waiting on hold I did some research and apparently this has affected lots of users. Sony has already prompted people to change their passwords. Some of the early people to have charges on their account seem to have had some trouble with Sony support, but as the issue has become more widespread it seems that Sony has been more standard in their replies. Not to fear monger or anything, but I wanted to warn everyone to review the security on your PSN account password, and to watch your transactions closely for a while. You should be automatically notified of transactions via email so that's quite easy (if you regularly check your email, that is...). I don't think the issue is that widespread, but $150 is a lot of money to be out for potentially a week.
A couple of weeks ago, Sony sent out e-mails to everybody telling them to change their passwords, so maybe this is related to that?
WELL time to change my password. I didn't even get (or maybe I didn't notice) an e-mail about this from Sony. So, off to do that now. Thanks for the heads up and I'm glad to hear you didn't have much trouble getting your money back.
Welp, I was initially quite happy to see that Sony hadn't charged my bank account at all--I thought maybe, because I reported it just a few hours after it happened, they might be able to cancel the transaction before my bank was notified. Just got $140 taken out of my account today, so we'll see how long it takes to get it back. Meanwhile, I have to survive on $88...
Yeah, I didn't get an email about it either. I suppose it's because I haven't touched my PS3 in about a month, so (un)fortunately the hacks are likely related to user activity. I'll have to be sure to remind myself to change the password whenever I do sign on to PSN. Sounds pretty scary, but glad that everything went alright for you~ (And of all the purchases it could be, it was FIFA, strange...)
