Patrick Klepek said:A few weeks ago, Mic Folk got a weird email. The person writing it claimed they'd been playing Overwatch on a PlayStation Network account for more than six months, but the password had changed recently. But why would Folk know anything about this random dude's account? As it turns out, they'd "purchased" Folk's account through a website called PSN Games, one of many businesses trafficking in the selling of cheap games by sketchy means.
The individual who bought Folk's account was an Overwatch fan named Bennett Eglinton.
"Hello I purchased overwatch from psngames.org and this email was used as the account info," reads an email from Eglinton, sent in early March. "However the password I was given for the PlayStation Network sign in no longer works. Did you happen to change it? Can I get the new info."
Here's how PSN Games, which claims to offer "legal and genuine digital downloads, but sent in the form of an account," works. Let's say you want to play Mass Effect: Andromeda, but don't want to pay the game's full price, $60. Right now, PSN Games is offering it for $41.99. After checking out, PSN Games sends you the login information for an account, complete with email address and password. You then sign into that account and mark your PlayStation 4 as the primary device, which grants you access to play the game locally on your machine. After downloading the game, you're supposed to log out of the account and switch back to yours.
It doesn't take much to become an amateur PSN hacker, either. (Though hacker might be a generous term, in this case.) A simple Google search, which I'm not going to share here, can bring up software that will scrape databases of compromised accounts, automatically test them against the PSN login page, and if it works, compile how many games are tied to the account.
All of this can be accomplished in minutes.
https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/art...work-account-resellers?utm_source=wptwitterus
Guess I shouldn't be surprised sites like these exist or how easy it is to test a database of compromised accounts against a site, but it's just something I never thought about.