Pete wanted to share the joy of muliplayer gaming with the rest of his family, and so opened up a Family Gold account. All was well until he used some of his own points to buy downloadable content for his stepson. The system prompted him for a password that his stepson didn’t have, Pete didn’t have, and no one at Microsoft has the power to recover.

Black Ops came out and my stepson was really into it and asked about mutiplayer online. After being a loyal xbox live subscriber since ’06, and having no issues at all, I decided my family could use some accounts as well for some online gaming. I signed up for a family gold account, and associated one of the available slots with an account on my machine. After some minor setup issues, including the need to create a new windows live account, all was well.

Some new DLC came out last month for Black Ops, and I wanted to let him download it for himself, with his own gold account. The family center allows you to grant an allowance to child account from the parent account. Great!

So I granted the allowance via my computer, and then we went to his account on the xbox. There’s 1200 MS points ($15) in there. Boom.

He goes to the store, selects the Escalation pack, and hits purchase. Up pops a prompt for a password. Uh oh.

See, when you create a gold account from the family center, it goes to over to windows live for an auto generated email and password, and only shows you all of this info once. Its something like fartingtoadstool69@xboxlivefamily.com. You can find the email again easy enough, but the password only appears once. They don’t email the new account info to the parent account, and there is no personal data associated with it since it’s auto generated.

No personal data means there is no way you can prove you own the account to get a password reset email sent to the parent account. Email recovery messages never came, even though the system said it was sending. Phone reps told me that it takes possibly 5 days for an email from that system to go through, call again next week.

The connection between the parent and child accounts, a rep told me, cannot be seen by the current Customer Support software at MS yet. They can see I gifted the points to the other account, but the system won’t allow me to take back the points, its a one way street.

After literally a MONTH on the phone with Xbox live support (Several hour-long phone calls a weekend, for 4 weeks now.) they’re not going to refund me the money. They say the reason is that the 1200 points I gifted came from a larger batch of points previously purchased, and since some of the points were used (I ended up just buying some more points and purchasing the expansion anyway) the 1200 points will sit unused in a locked account.

I have customer service two case numbers with Xbox Live, one for each of the account currently in my family plan.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.