Geeks around the globe should be aware of SOE’s negligence to avoid any unauthorized credit charges.

Sony Online Entertainment has just brought its servers back up this week, after the temporary shut down of its online games service and its Facebook games. SOE uncovered the April break-in that led to the theft of 77 million user accounts also affected its system, which resulted in the extended downtime of almost three weeks.

A spokesman for the online games unit stated the service was brought down at 1:30 am Pacific time on Monday May 2. The spokesman declined to say how many customers were affected, and without missing a beat in Sony fashion, none were alerted beyond a terse message on its website.

It’s no secret to the geeks around the world that Sony is no stranger to failing, but this one takes the cake. If you are a Sony subscriber and if you have had fraudulent charges billed on your credit card there’s a chance that your information was taken from Sony’s server. One day back in March, within a week of purchasing a game and subscribing through SOE I started to receive these weird packages in the mail; breasts lifts, coffee, diet pills, business cards, etc. Immediately after receiving the packages I reviewed the list of credit charges on my account, and low and behold there were a slew of unauthorized charges.

It wasn’t really that big of a deal because it was easy enough to contact my credit card company to straighten everything out, but at the time I thought it was the weirdest thing that even though these charges were unauthorized they somehow all managed to be shipped to my address in my name. But then just over a month later the news about Sony’s leak was released, and everything just seemed to make sense because it was a little too coincidental to be coincidence.


I digress, but if you are a SOE subscriber it would be wise to take a closer look at your monthly billing statements over the past few months.

Sony Online Entertainment is a division of Sony Corp, the global electronics company that operates online games for us geeks such as “EverQuest” and is separate from the PlayStation video game console division.

The spokesman, who could not confirm a Nikkei report that 12,700 credit card numbers were stolen from the intrusion of Sony Online Entertainment, said it was not “a second attack” and was linked to the April 17-19 break-in of the Sony PlayStation Network.

Sony stated, “In the course of our investigation into the intrusion into our systems we have discovered an issue that warrants enough concern for us to take the service down effective immediately.”

The news comes less than a week after Sony alerted customers that a hacker broke into Sony’s PlayStation video game network and stole names, addresses, passwords and possibly credit card numbers of its 77 million customers, and alerted customers a week after discovering the break-in.