Is my PSN account definitely lost?

I created my PSN account many years ago, approximately 2008 when I was 12. And now that we have to stay at home for COVID-19, I wanted to log into it.

Unfortunately, I couldn't remember my password (or my old password doesn't work anymore as it doesn't respect current password norms). So I went for "forgotten password" but when I receive the mail from Sony, I can only recover my account by giving my date of birth or my favorite plate.

Moreover, when I was 12, it wasn't allowed to have a PSN account, so I had to enter a "fake" date of birth. And, you've guess it, I can't remember what was my favourite plate when I was this young : I tried several like Pizza or Pastas without success. Another "problem" is that you can only have a reset e-mail link each 45 minutes. So you can only enter 5 dates of birth by 45 minutes with makes it very hard to try all possible combination.

I tried calling Sony France today (I'm French). They told me they can't recover my account unless I have :

• The serial number of the first PlayStation which I've created my PSN. I've sold this PS3...
• A recipe of a purchase on the PS Store. But at 12, I only bought games in real stores.
• A credit card that could have been linked to my PSN account, but, you know... 12 years ago, I have no idea what credit card my dad could have used, and if he used one.

Do I have a way to recover my PSN account? Or is it lost forever?

Solution 1:

Unfortunately, unless you can contact the person you sold that PS3 to AND they still have it, there most likely isn't any way to recover this account.

The question you should ask yourself though: is there anything on my account worth attempting to recover? You didn't buy any digital games, you most likely never added any Playstation balance, and any multiplayer games you might have played most likely have their servers taken down already or have since passed into irrelevance.

As far as I know, in your situation, the only reason you may want to recover your account is because you had a username that you don't want to lose, or you have a lot of trophies that you want to retain. Both of these are essentially just vanity items, and unless you have an extremely clever username (which you probably didn't have at 12) or an extremely rare trophy that very few people have (also unlikely at 12), I don't think there is any real reason to try and recover your account.

Of course, if you have something important attached to that account, then the equation might change, but as it stands, I think your best bet would be to create a new Playstation Network account and use a password manager to store your username, password and secret questions linked to this new account.