Report Of Possible PSN Card Fraud Rolls In
A reader on Reddit posted a situation that could possibly stand as a case of fraud, relating to the PlayStation Network breach that occurred back in April. The user posted that the debit card linked to his PSN account was charged 5 times, and all the charges were issued from over 500 miles away from his location. He even offers a photo of his bank statement to prove the charges.
In the post, he states that he has had the same account, with the same card for about 5 years, and no issues have come up until now. The charges appear to be from the state of Tennessee, while the user resides in Illinois, according to the post. The user even spoke with a bank representative, and asked if the charges could possibly be from the PSN account situation, and the banker responded with “Since nothing like this has happened to you in 5 years(I’ve had this same account for 5 years btw), I’d have to assume yes.”
The only issue with the post is that in it, the user states he was told that the charge came from a card swipe. This means that whoever made this fraudulent charge had to possess a replica of the card in order to make the purchase attempt. The user states he was told by the bank official that “the people probably made a fake card with [his] info and tried to use it.” This would mean that the swiper would have had to completely create a debit card from scratch with the user’s full information, including the metal strip used to hold data on the card. This provides somewhat of an issue.
The metal strip on most debit cards hold more information than just the card and account number. Most cards have a form of security code within the strip that is virtually impossible to guess without knowing the specific way that the specific cards are made. This piece of knowledge comes from a comment posted on the Reddit page where this post originated. If this is correct, that would mean that it would be near incredibly difficult to say this came from a PSN fraud transaction. This would mean that the fraudulent charge came from somewhere where the card had been swiped before.
Right now this is just a “take it with a grain of salt” situation, and there is no real way to tell if this was fraudulent from the PSN or not. To see the post in its originality, head to Reddit here. What do you guys think? Could this be a case of PSN fraud?
