I just got done with a chat with Sony Customer Service regarding fraudulent activity on my account, I figured I’d share my experience in case anyone else has the same issue come up (I assume it’s a relatively common experience).
Somebody apparently got access to my account a few days ago, changed the email address linked to the account (so that I couldn’t reset the password) changed the password, activated 2-step verification, then started buying up a few games on it (as my Sony account had been linked to my paypal account).
Of course I discovered all this on a Sunday, when their phone lines are closed, which left me having to go through their “online assistant” (ie chat bot). It took me about 30-40min to finally get transferred to a live chat rep, but because I had keyed in my “online ID” wrong in the chat form ( misremembered it), he was unable to help me, because that chat instance is restricted to whatever info I entered originally. So I then had to start a new chat instance with the correct info, which left me waiting for another 30-40min, which by that time put me into about 1.5 hours and I just closed out and resolved to get to it today.
Fast-forward to today, the wait this time was only about 20 min. Everything seemed to go fairly well, I got access to my account and changed the password back out. I then went ahead and activated 2-Step Verification for myself, to improve security to hopefully prevent this kind of thing in the future. After verifying my email address, this action apparently flagged my account for suspicious activity and my account is now suspended. I’m now having to wait for another specialist to resolve that issue. And because of that issue, the refund on the two games that were fraudulently bought is on hold because the agent can’t process it while the account is suspended.
After all of that, I requested to know what the email address had been changed to during the time that my account was hacked, as I want to file a police report at least and give that information out if I can. However, I was told that they could not give that information out for security reasons. In my mind, that email address became part of my account record, did it not? Why wouldn’t I have access to that info for my account? The agent literally just gave me back access to my account, I’m obviously the account owner.
Overall, I appreciated the help that CS gave me, I’ve worked that kind of job before, so I understand some of what they go through, but Sony’s process for resolving these issues was just kind of a lot of needless waste on my end and infuriating that I don’t have access to my own account information. There was some other strange things about the whole experience that I won’t go into here, so just be prepared if you ever have to contact Sony about this.
Thank you for reading my long rant.
How on earth did you manage to contact an actual human CS agent? I tried the chat bot, live chat, and calling with no luck.
Quickest way with the chat bot was to tell it ‘Something else’, then ‘I want to speak with an agent’ when it asks you what your issue is. Still seems to take anywhere from 10min to an hour to get helped, probably depends on day of the week and time of day.
Ok I’ll try this, hopefully this works in Canada too. It’s unreal how hard it’s been to get any help from Sony for a suspended account.
Even though you’ve not had a great experience on a whole, this is probably one of the better ones that I’ve seen in posts like this. Still, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to deal with, I hope you get it sorted.
This sounds like my worst nightmare. Glad to hear you got your account back
Oh, and apparently filing police reports may be a waste of time for the police, based on this Sony Forum where a long line of police detectives reach out for information, Sony just redirects them to their general Support address:
https://us.community.sony.com/s/question/0D50B00004IKtFVSA1/where-to-send-a-subpoena?language=en_US
I still plan on doing it, just kind of weird how unaccountable and uncooperative these companies can be.
I’m not sure what country you’re in but if you’re in the UK or EU then Sony MUST give you access to all of the details on your account and ALL information they hold, including past email addresses if you request it. You can then pass that to the police. They won’t do anything really but you’ll get a crime reference number incase Sony try to keep your money so you can take it further and get your money back.
US, so no, they probably have more rights than I do.
