In recent weeks, we’ve heard from quite a few Xbox Gold customers who report that points have been stolen from their accounts, but Microsoft doesn’t seem terribly concerned about it, or about stopping the account breaches. Today’s example: reader Jesse, who loaded several cards on his account before a move, for some reason assuming that the points would be safer in his account (in the cloud!) than packed for his move. Not so. Someone spent those points on content that Jesse never downloaded, and Microsoft isn’t giving him those points back.

Being a gamer, I own an Xbox 360 and subscribe to Xbox Gold. I can’t say my Xbox get a serious amount of love, but I do bring it out from time to time.

A while back, there was a deal for 1600 Point cards and I bought 4 or 5 of them. I would use them as needed. I was in the process of moving and instead of simply packing these cards, I added them all to my account thinking they’d be safe.

Well then in June of this year, someone got into my account and went on a spending spree and spent 5400 points ($67.50 MSRP) on a bunch of content. They then tried to buy more points using an expired credit card.

I started up my Xbox one day in July and couldn’t get into my account. I went through the full account recovery and password reset and was able to gain access to my account again. I noticed the problem and called Microsoft right away.

I told them about my problem and asked about getting the points back. They said this shouldn’t be a problem and I provided them with a bunch of information. They insisted on locking out my account so they could assist me in recovering it (I already had it back and changed the password, email and anything else to prevent someone to get access to it again).

Six weeks pass and finally I get an email from Microsoft informing me of how to recover my account. They provide me with 2 codes to extend my Xbox Live subscription and then inform me that no unauthorized purchases were made on my account when it was out of my control.

I call them back a couple days later and ask them how they came to that conclusion. They proceed to tell me that they understand my frustration and will need to lock me out of my account again to help me in recovering my account to get the points back.

Then early November rolls around and I get a similar email, this time telling me that it looks like I already regained control, provide 2 months of Xbox Gold for free, and tell me they would refund any of the points used during that time within 10 days.

Being the impatient person I am, I call Microsoft again, ask them to look into the Service Request to see if they were going to refund anything. The Service Rep says they don’t have anything in the system and he opens another case to get the points refunded.

Its been a full month now, and I’ve yet to hear anything back, but I’m sure they’ll tell me the same thing they have the last 2 times.

So now I’ve let my Xbox collect dust for all these months and I still am no further to getting any of these points back. Of course I was dumb for putting all the points into my account, but I didn’t know it would be that hard for them to see that my console didn’t download the content and they could easily mark the downloads as fraudulent, refund my points, and block access to the content on the thief’s console, but I guess that’s asking too much from a service that charges an annual fee to provide a better experience.

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