Will Sony Pay for New Credit Cards, Other Fraud Costs?
This is from May 1st but due to some requests I’ve gotten about whether Sony will reimburse customers for any bank-related costs due to the security breach, I thought it was worth highlighting.
From FeedTheGamer:
In this morning’s news conference, Sony Computer Entertainment head Kazuo Hirai said the company would consider covering costs associated with reissuing credit cards to PlayStation Network subscribers who feel their accounts have been compromised by the massive data breach of April 20.
Hirai, noting that there have been no confirmed incidents in which fraud was committed with a credit card number stolen from the PSN breach, said the company has asked the FBI for a criminal investigation of the matter.
While there are 77 million accounts in the PlayStation Network, some are are held by the same household or person. Hirai said the owners of 10 million PSN accounts have been notified that their credit card information may have been compromised. However, the three-digit CVV number on the back of the card, required for purchases over the Internet, was definitely not compromised.
The replacement of a lost or stolen credit card is typically done for a customer for free, but to banks there is a cost of printing, processing and mailing the cards, plus a cost of lost business while the customer waits for a new one. Earlier in the week, news reports pegged the transactional costs of card replacement at between $3 and $5 per card. It’s unclear who Sony would compensate, if it does, or if enough cardholders will ditch their cards to make it an issue that banks complain about to Sony.
Tags: account security, compromised accounts
Trackback from your site.
Comments (4)
Murfalad
| #
The credit card replacement is a business to business issue imo since the cost to the consumer is nothing (and we are positively encouraged to report if we think that they have been compromised, credit card companies will not want to discourage us from doing that).
Also taking into account that many of these cards would have been out of date on the database anyway (either that or SOE has 24.7 million subs 😉 ), and many cards would be close to date too. So I think the real additional cost to credit card companies will be fairly low, maybe not enough to justify any costs if legal guys get involved.
Reply
Triffilis
| #
@ Murfalad
I agree, the cost to replace a card for the public is 0$. I think people are simply trying to get what they can from this situation, which is down right greedy, pretty sure Sony will loose Millions cause of this.
Of course they are at fault for not having a safe network BUT give em a break they are taking care of this situation.
Reply
Lathain
| #
“plus a cost of lost business while the customer waits for a new one” = 3$ ?
that a huge cost …
Reply
omgwtflol
| #
10 million accounts, if only a quarter of that ask for reimbursement that’s still nearly 8 million dollars.
I think that was just a statement to appease the media, “consider” is the key word here.
Reply