A well-known PlayStation gamer has quit the company, for reasons that should make PSN account owners take pause, and try to secure their accounts.
Hakoom, AKA Hakam Karim, a gamer from Bahrain, is still on record in the Guinness World Records for Most PSNProfile Trophy points collected. Over the weekend, he revealed that he would be retiring from trophy hunting on PlayStation, but it took him a few days to explain and share evidence of what happened.
Hakoom’s account was hacked, but this was not a simple hack. As Hakoom explained it, Sony refused to reinstate his account, and the reasons why casts an enormous cloud on whether consumers can really trust the company.
Sony is particularly well known for the vulnerability of their online systems, worse than Microsoft, Nintendo, and Valve. Some of us will still remember the 2011 PSN hack, which led to a 23 day outage and cost Sony $ 171 million. Since that time, Sony had supposedly upgraded its systems, and has of course we are now two console generations later. PlayStation services have extended beyond their consoles to allow gamers to play their library on Windows PCs, cloud streaming, and also to log onto PlayStation Studios games published on other platforms like Steam and Epic Game Store.
We’ll enumerate the sequence of events below for better clarity:
- September 9, 2024 – Hakoom cannot access his PSN and learns he was hacked.
- Hakoom waits for a few days, believing it could just be a minor bug. He does not receive the email he expects to tell him about the account hack.
- Hakoom contacts customer service, talking to ten different agents, and this is where he says that Sony ‘treated me like a piece of trash.’ They won’t give him information, including why he can’t access his account.
- Hakoom manages to contact what he calls a private department at PlayStation to ‘get on the case.’
- Later Hakoom then receives a Whatsapp message, revealing that his information has been compromised and spread online.
- He is shown evidence that a PSN admin is doing this hacking, and that they are doing it to multiple accounts. That includes evidence a Polyphony Digital employee also got hacked, and other evidence that they have a user’s TrueTrophy information.
- Hakoom shares this information to Sony.
- Hakoom then receives a suspicious phone call from someone claiming to be from Sony. Hakoom confirms from Sony that they don’t call their customers.
- After two days the ‘Sony employee’, who calls himself Anthony, claims that they need to verify his credit card information from him. For those who don’t know, this is a clear (and failed) attempt at social engineering.
- Hakoom recorded both calls, and shares this to Sony as well.
- Finally, Hakoom receives an email stating that he violated Sony’s terms of service.
As Hakoom explains it, Sony’s email indicates that he has no recourse, and seemingly, they aren’t going to investigate if he was a victim of fraud or if their company has moles compromising the system from within. Sony cites this suspicious activity as proof of term violations:
- You platinumed games which require 100h to platinum in few hours
- You completed games in 0 mins
- You logged in over 2000 accounts on PlayStation consoles
- You logged in 29 PlayStations
Hakoom later figures out that item # 1 actually refers to a PlayStation trophy system called auto pops, or instant platinums. You can read more about it here. Item # 2, on the other hand, is an issue with PSN store, as there are many developers making games that let you platinum after playing for as few as five seconds. This was clearly set up for trophy addicts, and is one of the reasons Hakoom stopped chasing trophies.
But you can see where this goes. The last two instances are certainly suspicious activity, but given that Hakoom claimed he was hacked, it did not seem like Sony took his claims seriously. Of course, if this situation happened to you, you would also want to stop patronizing the company that did it to you.
Now, we will acknowledge that there is a possibility that Hakoom doesn’t know the whole story, or that he may be withholding information that we should know about. It is then up to Sony to respond to these claims as appropriate.
If Sony tries to sweep the issue under the rug as well, this is more than fodder for console wars. PlayStation users are likely vulnerable right now to this hacker, and PSN account holders need to secure their safety.
Hakoom was smart enough not to connect his financial information on his account, so if you have an account, you should do the same thing. You will also want to enable two factor authentication, and maybe there’s a need to check your bank activity as well.
We certainly don’t want to throw out allegations that may not be entirely substantiated. But until Sony gives an official statement, to either corroborate or disprove these claims, we have to warn PlayStation users that things are not on the up and up.
