I was a victim of the Sony banhammer before. A Sony rep said my psn id was against their terms of service, and is what led to my ban. They acknowledged that I invested over a thousand dollars into my account, so they allowed me to change my psn id so I could keep my purchases. The problem with having your name changed though, is you lose all of your leaderboard stats in all of your games, trophies, and cloud saves etc. It was even more heartbreaking because I had over 18 levels in the LittleBigPlanet series that would all get deleted as well, one of my levels were "Team Picked" on top of that.
I was on the phone with a Sony representative the entire time, and he was trying to help me pick a new screen name, which is a HUGE pain in the ass, since every good name has been taken, and picking a name over the phone made me feel like I had to rush. I kept trying to pick a different screen name, including several that included my last name (which were also already taken) when the rep stopped me. "Hold on a second" he said. "I just checked your credit card you have on file and realized your last name is the same that your profile uses, I'll go ahead and reverse the ban we had in place, we apologize for the inconvenience." I was extremely happy to hear the good news, but it has definitely made me nervous about the "all digital" future we are living in. The fact that you can have a lifetime of purchases, game saves, achievements, stats and everything else vanish with a push of a button scares the hell out of me.
