David Tremblay, who at one point held the record for earning the most PlayStation Trophies in the world, has been permanently banned from the PlayStation Network. The former top trophy hunter blames a hacker and Sony’s “incompetent” support and security teams.
As reported by PC Mag, earlier this week Tremblay’s PSN account, dav1d_123, was “permanently suspended” over alleged rule violations. Before this ban, Tremblay had at one point been the top PSN Trophy holder in the world and had even received an entry in the Guinness World Records for having the most Platinum trophies. But last October, Tremblay retired from trophy hunting after a hacker allegedly took over his PSN account. “Your PSN account isn’t safe. Anyone can steal your account,” tweeted Tremblay after a hacker bypassed his account’s 2FA security and used phishing tactics via PSN chat support to gain access.
So last week, Tremblay took part in a big PCMag article about PSN’s major security issues, and as a result of calling out his hacker’s attempt to extort him, the hacker allegedly got his PlayStation account permabanned.
PCMag says the hacker, who had been in communication with Tremblay and returned access to his account after seemingly not getting any money, told the outlet that the former top trophy hunter had lied and so “now he lost his account again.”
How the top PSN trophy hunter was banned
Tremblay suspects that the hacker used a “bomb message” to get his account suspended. This is a tactic where hackers send messages that violate Sony’s PlayStation Network rules to alt accounts. Then, at any point in the future, they can report those offending messages to Sony and get the account banned, even if they no longer have access to it. Tremblay says the hacker had “threatened to do exactly this” if he talked to PCMag about the situation.
Sony has yet to respond publicly about the suspension or alleged security issues. Since being banned last week, Tremblay says his account appears to have zero trophies now.
“I have passed the last 16 years+ trophy hunting on PlayStation,” he told the outlet. “I have dedicated way too many hours than I’d like to admit (10s of thousands) to this and gotten all five related Guinness World Records. This is heartbreaking. To make matters worse, I had warned support multiple times that obviously any message sent from my account during the period I was hacked was to be disregarded. They totally ignored this.”
“You would expect my account to be under stricter protection and have security measures in place, but it seems not.”