Locked out of PS-Plus and PS Network on day one of PS5 ownership

...and I'll tell you how it happened and how to avoid it happening to you should you find yourself upgrading to a PS5 in the future.

So I was super excited with my new purchase, it's been years that I have been eyeing up at a PS5 and just never got one because I always told myself that I will buy one once my PS4 stops working. Things happen, and because my brother and a few friends who are the only people I play online with all had PS5's, I wasn't able to play along with them on most games. It's funny that a game so repetitive and some would say a bit boring, that I ended up biting the bullet and finally buying a PS5.

I was like a kid on Christmas when I got this thing home but since I am an adult now I was very careful with how I opened the packaging, making sure to hang on to every little thing that was contained inside. I carefully plugged it all up and followed all the instructions when I fired it up.

In retrospect, one of the moves that I made next was one that eventually failed and I am glad that it did.

I decided to transfer ALL DATA from my PS4 to my PS5 using the wifi. I didn't pay attention to the little sidebar where it informs you about how long this is estimated to take. If I had, I would have seen that it was going to be around 80 hours to completion.

Thankfully, in my situation something went wrong and I had to start the entire process over. This was after just a couple of hours and after that time I changed course and decided to simply transfer all the personal information and trophies etc, nothing else. The individual games might not even be compatible from one system to the next so that would just be a waste of time anyway, right?

Well, during that time my PS4 kept randomly turning on without permission frequently, and this lead to my eventual dismay as when I tried to go to the PS-Network in order to play a game of Chaosbane with my brother that I was forced to login manually, and then told that my account was permanently suspended.

I'm no goodie two-shoes, but I don't just run around violating ToS for the sheer fun of it. I couldn't imagine what I could have possibly been doing wrong and it was a massive pain in the ass because since I have a night job and the USA tech support keeps bankers hours I couldn't do anything about it. I will say that Sony does exactly what every other company does and that is to do anything in their power to prevent you from being able to talk to an actual person. Finding where you can speak to a representative is an exercise in extreme frustration on their website as they force you to navigate through a maze of unrelated FAQ's before you eventually discover somewhere that you can maybe speak to a human. In my case I was then greeted by their hours of operation but since it took me so damn long to even get to that point I just left the page open for the next 10 hours.

As it turns out, my account was automatically flagged for fraud because my phone number has changed since I bought my PS4 8 years ago. Imagine that? A person has a different phone number after nearly a decade? Well, when entering my new information on my new PS5, I kind of preferred that it have my actual phone number and not one that I had in 2015 - maybe that's just how I like to operate.

Anyway, when my PS4 kept auto-turning-itself on, it was accessing the PS-Network as well, and this would happen every time that I put my PS5 into rest-mode or sleep-mode or whatever it is called. So from Sony's point of view they have two different accounts attempting to access the same PS-Plus account multiple times a day.

I was able to talk to someone and they asked a bunch of security questions, several of which I had difficulty remembering such as "what is the last 4 digits of the credit card you have registered with your account?" Like many Americans, I have a bunch of credit cards and I didn't remember which one it was. But we eventually got to the point where they believed it was me and explained what had happened.

I am only now just getting back in to my own account and while I appreciate the fraud prevention attempt, I think that it would be a lot better if they were to, I dunno, pop off an email to the person explaining what had happened rather than just putting something so ominous on the screen as "permanently suspended."

So if you buy a PS5 and are transferring data from it to your PS5, make sure that you have the feature on the PS4 that auto-logs-in switched off, because if your smart TV behaves the way that my Samsung does, it will switch your PlayStation on even if you don't want it to. I have since deactivated all of that.