Broken consoles... where are card details stored?

[MikeRox]

Okay I got my PS3 back from consoledoctor with them saying they were unable to fix the yellow light of death. I've also got a RROD Xbox 360 elite lying around too. In order to raise funds I want to sell them off as spares/repairs, however I know both have had my card details on them for PSN/XBL and was just curious as to where this information is stored. Is it on the HDD? The server?

For the Xbox, I'm certain it's all stored on the HDD so putting it on another console and wiping it should be fine. For the PS3, I understand the card details are stored on PSN (as it automatically knew them on my PSP Go etc too) in which case, as it was set to auto sign in on PSN, are all these details stored on the HDD? If so formatting the drive before selling the thing on should be fine? I understand shoving it in another console formats it.

I just don't want to sell em for ?40-50 as broken, to find several grand taken out of my account lol.

[Papercut]

I'm fairly certain that in both cases the card details are associated with your online account, and held remotely by MS or Sony.

The PS3 also stores PSN accounts on internal flash (so if the HDD goes your account is still there), whereas with the 360 this would only be possible if you had copied your account details to an internal memory unit, should the 360 have had one.

If I am right that the card details are held remotely, changing the PSN and XBL account passwords, and recovering the XBL gamertag on another machine, should prevent any stored accounts from connecting online to obtain more account details. You could even change registered email addresses if possible. You could also unregister the cards in both accounts, although XBL may not let you do this, and unregister the machines from DLC drm licenses (can for XBL, not sure how PSN does this).

I think the 360 itself obfuscates card details when purchasing points, and the details are only available by logging in to xbox.com. Also the PSN requires a password when registering/unregistering cards.

So yeah, why not format the HDDs as an extra bit of paranoia, then change the account passwords, email addresses just to make sure.

[MikeRox]

changing account passwords... did NOT think of that! You are a star!

[Papercut]

You may need to 'recover' the XBL account on a different 360 still, which would invalidate the account credentials that are stored on any other 360.