Sony permanently banned the PSN account of David Tremblay, a five-time Guinness record holder. The Canadian's account, dav1d_123, carried more than 432,000 trophies and 16,352 platinums before the ban erased them all. PCMag reported the ban on March 10, 2026. The block came not from anything Tremblay did, but from a hacker who had previously hijacked the account.
The attack began in October 2025. A hacker bypassed Tremblay's two-factor authentication (2FA) through Authy and took control of the account. While inside, the attacker sent messages that violated PSN's terms of service to their own alt accounts, then hid those messages. Tremblay eventually regained access, but the hidden messages stayed in Sony's system.
In March 2026, Tremblay participated in a PCMag investigation about PSN security flaws. The hacker, who had previously threatened retaliation, responded by unhiding the old messages and reporting them to Sony. The company issued a permanent ban. The suspension email cited "attempt to sell items, accounts, or services" as the reason, according to TheGamer.
I have passed the last 16 years+ trophy hunting on PlayStation. 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. 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.
— David Tremblay told PCMag
Tremblay's Guinness records include 81,596 gold trophies, verified April 29, 2024. He held 70,345 silver trophies as of July 12, 2024. His PSNProfiles.org listing still shows level 3,302, 18,568 completed games, and a 99.19% completion rate. On Sony's servers, the trophies now read zero.
The attack vector exploits Sony's own support system. According to PCMag's investigation, hijacking a PSN account requires only the owner's name, email address, and a transaction number from any past PlayStation Store purchase. Armed with those three data points, an attacker can contact Sony's support chatbot, override the password, and disable 2FA. Transaction numbers from receipts years old still work.
French journalist Nicolas Lellouche of Numerama experienced the same flaw in December 2025. A hacker contacted Sony support, provided Lellouche's console serial number (visible in photos he had posted years earlier) and a transaction number. The support agent manually disabled 2FA and changed the account's email to the attacker's address. Lellouche's account was hijacked twice in six weeks, according to Insider Gaming, despite having both 2FA and passkeys enabled.
Your PSN account isn't safe. Anyone can steal your account.
— Tremblay posted on social media after the original October 2025 hack, before the permanent ban
PSN security failures have a long history. The 2011 breach exposed data from 77 million accounts. Stolen PSN accounts with large trophy collections or game libraries now sell for hundreds to thousands of dollars on Telegram and black market forums. In some cases, hackers publish account credentials freely to prove the method works.
Sony has not commented on Tremblay's ban or on the support chatbot vulnerability described in PCMag's investigation. Tremblay has filed an appeal.
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