4 ms·

As someone with intimate knowledge of console account buying and selling, I can elaborate some. The main site used for buying stolen/jacked accounts is called

As someone with intimate knowledge of console account buying and selling, I can elaborate some. The main site used for buying stolen/jacked accounts is called ogusers. The screenshots in that article are of ogusers, I recognize the layout. Most of the people who buy and sell accounts do it for profit and fame. Something among teens these days really drives them to want to be internet famous. Having a 1, 2, or 3 character account name garners attention to these people. 1 letter xbox accounts go for 10-20k. 1 letter social media accounts (twitter and IG mostly) go for anywhere from 10k upwards to 75k. A good amount of the 1 letter accounts on these platforms are bought or stolen, very few original creators own the accounts. The problem is that people aren't content with getting an account by being the creator of the name. They want accounts by any means necessary. Some of these people do this for a living, they've devised their own secret techniques for gaming the system to get account information so they can game password resets and account retrievals. I know for PSN there is a tightly guarded way to pull the email account and name information from any account. For the most sought after accounts, attackers play the customer support reps like a fiddle. Say the right words and they will happily hand over sensitive information. Even if you buy an account, there's no telling if you get to keep it. Microsoft has been really trying to crack down on this, and has banned hundreds of original accounts over this. I'm not how PSN handles it. IG has been trying to crack down as well. It is a sad state of affairs. Owning an original account isn't about creating it anymore, it's about how much you will spend to buy that name or who you know that can jack the account. Unfortunately, all these platforms are not setup to handle theft, fraud, and selling. If you lose an account, it is next to impossible in most cases to get it back. In some cases you can get the account back by providing sensitive account info that only the original owner would know. However, the modern process of 'locking down' a stolen account includes flooding it with fake information to push back the original information past the point of being able to be used.

ivm 8y ago
It's not a "teens these days" thing though, short ICQ numbers were constantly hacked and resold fifteen years ago.
- TheGrumpyBrit 8y ago
  I have an 8 digit ICQ number. It's probably the only number apart from my SSN that I can still remember.
gideonparanoid 8y ago
Reminds me of this blog post [0] about a guy who lost his Twitter @N. [0] https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-24eb09e026dd https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...
babuskov 8y ago
> Microsoft has been really trying to crack down on this, and has banned hundreds of original accounts over this. Just require 7+ characters and at least one number in the username and suddenly you lose 99% of "lucrative" names.
- zolthrowaway 8y ago
  This is a problem with usernames being the display names on the platform. For example, my friend's Xbox Live name is in the format XX## from before Microsoft upped the minimum character count. He was grandfathered in. He's fairly attached to his name and forcing him to go to one of the remaining unique usernames doesn't seem fair when he's been paying for the service for over a decade. In that time, thousands of "good" usernames have been taken and all that seems to be left is John33191299991102. Asking them to switch names they've already locked in is a very difficult balancing act between this problem and pissing off their longest standing customers. Steam's approach of unique username and your choice of display name makes the most sense to me. If I want to be Bob, I can be. If I want to choose something rather unique, I can. However, this opens up a whole new set of problems with impersonation. I don't think this is a problem on XBox with the buddy system and no trade economy though.
  - Woofles 8y ago
    Blizzard's way of doing names makes tons of sense and doesn't rely on an incredibly awful search to find people. You can name your account whatever you want, but they automatically give you a unique number (when paired with your name) so people can easily add you to their friends list. So you can sign up with the name "Bob" and they will give you "Bob#1234" for people to find you. This way you don't have any worry about people having short usernames being special or unique. The issue is that this kind of username scheme works for gamers (that aren't trying to be standout/unique necessarily and just want their username), but I don't believe would be accepted by social media influencers whose usernames are their brand names.
    - starshadowx2 8y ago
      Discord does the same thing with the discriminator, and if you're a Discord Nitro subscriber you get the ability to manually change it to whatever combo you like (as long as someone with the same username doesn't have that number).
TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
> 1 letter xbox accounts go for 10-20k. 1 letter social media accounts (twitter and IG mostly) go for anywhere from 10k upwards to 75k. > Even if you buy an account, there's no telling if you get to keep it. What sort of person 1) has the discretionary funds to buy an account like this, 2) wants one of these accounts so badly that they will pay that kind of money for it, and 3) is so stupid as to believe that it won't be ganked back by a different hacker, or even the same one again? In other words, WHO IS FUELING THIS ABSURDITY?! There has to be a demand side of this equation, and, from my chair, it looks like people who have WAY more money than sense. I know there's a lot of them in the world, but, still. I've seen several headlines recently that Sony has the console crown right now, but it seems like it wouldn't take much fear mongering by Microsoft in the right places to use this as a scare tactic against PS to try to push people back to XB. I mean, sure, this particular user "won," but you can't expect Vice to do a story about everyone who gets screwed.
- moftz 8y ago
  Twitter and Instagram I can understand, there are a lot of people on those services that make a lot of money promoting brands and products. Having an interesting name on there can increase your marketability. Like "@tom" or "@lisa", you look cooler (rather than "@realmattdamon1977") and seem like you've been on here for quite awhile so therefore people should listen to you. I guess it might be a bit hard to show that you bought an account versus stole an account if the original owner tries to reverse the email address change. Maybe someone could build an account escrow site where ownership is transferred to a third party until the sale is complete.

ivm 8y ago

It's not a "teens these days" thing though, short ICQ numbers were constantly hacked and resold fifteen years ago.

TheGrumpyBrit 8y ago
I have an 8 digit ICQ number. It's probably the only number apart from my SSN that I can still remember.

gideonparanoid 8y ago

Reminds me of this blog post [0] about a guy who lost his Twitter @N. [0] https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-24eb09e026dd https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...

babuskov 8y ago

> Microsoft has been really trying to crack down on this, and has banned hundreds of original accounts over this. Just require 7+ characters and at least one number in the username and suddenly you lose 99% of "lucrative" names.

zolthrowaway 8y ago
This is a problem with usernames being the display names on the platform. For example, my friend's Xbox Live name is in the format XX## from before Microsoft upped the minimum character count. He was grandfathered in. He's fairly attached to his name and forcing him to go to one of the remaining unique usernames doesn't seem fair when he's been paying for the service for over a decade. In that time, thousands of "good" usernames have been taken and all that seems to be left is John33191299991102. Asking them to switch names they've already locked in is a very difficult balancing act between this problem and pissing off their longest standing customers. Steam's approach of unique username and your choice of display name makes the most sense to me. If I want to be Bob, I can be. If I want to choose something rather unique, I can. However, this opens up a whole new set of problems with impersonation. I don't think this is a problem on XBox with the buddy system and no trade economy though.
- Woofles 8y ago
  Blizzard's way of doing names makes tons of sense and doesn't rely on an incredibly awful search to find people. You can name your account whatever you want, but they automatically give you a unique number (when paired with your name) so people can easily add you to their friends list. So you can sign up with the name "Bob" and they will give you "Bob#1234" for people to find you. This way you don't have any worry about people having short usernames being special or unique. The issue is that this kind of username scheme works for gamers (that aren't trying to be standout/unique necessarily and just want their username), but I don't believe would be accepted by social media influencers whose usernames are their brand names.
  - starshadowx2 8y ago
    Discord does the same thing with the discriminator, and if you're a Discord Nitro subscriber you get the ability to manually change it to whatever combo you like (as long as someone with the same username doesn't have that number).

TheRealDunkirk 8y ago

> 1 letter xbox accounts go for 10-20k. 1 letter social media accounts (twitter and IG mostly) go for anywhere from 10k upwards to 75k. > Even if you buy an account, there's no telling if you get to keep it. What sort of person 1) has the discretionary funds to buy an account like this, 2) wants one of these accounts so badly that they will pay that kind of money for it, and 3) is so stupid as to believe that it won't be ganked back by a different hacker, or even the same one again? In other words, WHO IS FUELING THIS ABSURDITY?! There has to be a demand side of this equation, and, from my chair, it looks like people who have WAY more money than sense. I know there's a lot of them in the world, but, still. I've seen several headlines recently that Sony has the console crown right now, but it seems like it wouldn't take much fear mongering by Microsoft in the right places to use this as a scare tactic against PS to try to push people back to XB. I mean, sure, this particular user "won," but you can't expect Vice to do a story about everyone who gets screwed.

moftz 8y ago
Twitter and Instagram I can understand, there are a lot of people on those services that make a lot of money promoting brands and products. Having an interesting name on there can increase your marketability. Like "@tom" or "@lisa", you look cooler (rather than "@realmattdamon1977") and seem like you've been on here for quite awhile so therefore people should listen to you. I guess it might be a bit hard to show that you bought an account versus stole an account if the original owner tries to reverse the email address change. Maybe someone could build an account escrow site where ownership is transferred to a third party until the sale is complete.