Sunday, August 7, 2011

Sony Security: Victim and Perpetrator.

I just got a message saying "A child of yours has created an account for Clone Wars". Apparently someone harvested my email address and is doing who knows what on a multiplayer game MMORPG game for children. (A lot of this sort of thing is scam artists and gold sellers on an MMORPG.)

I called up Sony, concerned that someone might be using my email as their identity to do illegal/immoral acts on it, or even something like a child predator who I could get in trouble for, and they at first told me "don't worry, someone probably misspelled their email address (even though their "handle" looked suspiciously random, lots of numbers) . After some firmness on the phone with them, they said they'd cancel the account, and even sent me an email message confirming that the account was canceled.

Today, several days later, after being informed the account was closed by them, I just got another message from that game, saying "your child has selected the nickname "Anakain Lightsayber" Apparently Sony Online, so recently the victim of a security break-in, doesn't mind if their free2play MMO game for children is used by scammers / child predators / whatever using other people's email addresses. I wish I had a lawyer on-call so I could make it stop. I always suspected that all many MMO game companies cared about were subscriptions, and that's why gold sellers, botting, and scammers thrived on all but a few of them, This confirms that. Unfortunately, this means that Sony Online is being a party to identity theft, and other criminal activity perpetrated against children as well, instead of just a victim of it as the well-publicized break-in of Sony's lax security demonstrated recently.