I had this happen to me with my first Xbox 360 way back in the day. It's the first time I got burned on digital purchasing. I bought my 360 at launch, and thought the online digital storefront was pretty cool so I had picked up a few arcade games and some DLC (you couldn't buy full games back then).
Some hack got released online where it was easy for people to guess or infer something like this console ID - I don't know the particulars. Basically someone used a program to randomly generate a console ID that matched my console's identifier, and I woke up one morning to find out I couldn't sign into Xbox Live. I was banned from Xbox Live for 999 years. I contacted Microsoft and they basically told me "you shouldn't have been hacking". There was no way (and still no way) to place my account in good standing. I went back to gaming on PC for the next decade, I didn't trust consoles and online purchases in the least bit after that. Eventually in 2014 I held Microsoft's feet to the fire and jumped through their hoops for legal arbitration. I was seeking damages in the form of money I had spent on digital games and DLC that was no longer accessible - which totaled around $400. Microsoft settled out of court and sent me a check. I'm guessing it was cheaper to pay me off in this case rather than to send a guy to present flimsy evidence to a judge.
So I've learned to trust game consoles and digital storefronts again - mostly out of necessity. I don't want to think how much I've spent on my current Microsoft account, but it's in the thousands of dollars easily. There were probably enough cases like mine that went sideways over the years that most storefronts have a policy now that they'll ban the hardware itself rather than deactivate the user account. Still though, I sympathize with all the innocent users affected by this.
ManaByte
but the link). After going to the PS3 sub it appears the issue this person was having was not related to the leak at all. I am of the opinion if someone has to embellish something to make their point stronger they are already using weak evidence. I am not okay if only a few PS3 users are impacted by this but I am also not seeing a widespread issue even after doing a search for "ban" on the PS3 sub. One of the bigger threads there was a three day ban. It looked more like an account hack and not a console ban.
