Several years ago, I bought my son an Xbox 360 for his birthday. Along with this, I got him a subscription to Xbox Live Gold. Because he was a minor at the time, getting him an account set up on Xbox was a complete pain in the ass, involving me providing a credit card to prove I was over 18 and could ‘vouch for’ him, then a bunch of iterations of logging in and out and providing various approvals/confirmations, and so on, which took the best part of an hour to do (all the while, the boy pacing around anxiously just wanting to use his new gift). Honestly, if they were actively discouraging people from using their machines they couldn’t have done a better job. Anyway, the whole thing was such a palaver that I vowed never to do it again, and set up his Gold subscription to just auto-renew, on his birthday.
A few years later, he outgrew the Xbox and moved on to PC gaming. He bought himself a gaming PC for that express purpose, and sold his Xbox 360, to Gamestop (a chain that also buys/sells second hand games and consoles). I was fine with this (the console was a gift and his to do with what he wants), but what he neglected to tell me was that he hadn’t done a factory reset on the machine before taking it into Gamestop. And Gamestop didn’t wipe it either, and they just sold it on to someone else, who then started it up, found themselves auto-logged on to my son’s account, and promptly started buying games using the saved method of payment – namely my credit card!
I contacted Gamestop and they said they couldn’t tell me who the Xbox was sold to. So I contacted Microsoft, and after what seemed an eternity of going through automated response systems, and being bounced between the Microsoft main division and the Xbox division, they told me that they couldn’t remove the credit card from the account, as there had to be a valid one on there, and the only way to remove the console from my son’s Xbox Live account was by logging onto the console itself, which obviously I couldn’t do. I contacted the bank, who told me that they couldn’t do anything about the charges, because I had authorized them by putting my card details on the Xbox. So I ended up just canceling that credit card at the bank. This meant that I had to re-set up every automatic payment and bill-pay I had set up for it, but at least Johnny Gamer couldn’t keep charging me for whatever crappy game-packs he as downloading – although he would still get to use the Xbox Live account until that came up for renewal (again, Microsoft said there was nothing they could do about that).
When it did come up for renewal, I got a notification that it couldn’t be renewed because the method of payment was invalid, which was exactly what I wanted, so I just ignored it. And continued to ignore it every year since, because apparently Microsoft never forgets. Still, at least this annual email reminder made sure that I didn’t forget my son’t birthday…
Fast-forward all the way to last week, and I bought myself a new Microsoft Surface to do some work on. Because it didn’t come with a CD drive, and has a limited (solid-state) hard drive (26Gb vs the 6TB I have in my desktop machine) I decided I’d just get a subscription to Microsoft Office 365, which would run largely in the cloud, and save my files to OneDrive. It’s also relatively cheap (or at least significantly cheaper than the subscription I have to Adobe InDesign…), and I was already signed onto my Microsoft Account (which, ridiculously, I needed to have in order to be able to log on to my own machine…), so I just jumped to the subscriptions page, entered my credit card number, and I was off and running.
The next day, I get an email from Microsoft telling me that I have “successfully renewed [my] Xbox Live Gold subscription for another 12 months”. Eh? What? How?? I log on to my Surface (which I looooove, btw…), go to my Microsoft Account, and check my subscriptions. It shows only my Office 365 subscription. No mention of an Xbox Live subscription. Now I’m confused. I check my bank account, and sure enough, the Xbox money has gone out. I go back to the email confirmation I received, and see that it was sent to my personal e-mail, whereas my Microsoft Account is under my professional e-mail (I like to compartmentalize). Oh, I figure. I must just have two Microsoft Accounts – one under each email address. So I go to microsoft.com and try to log on using my personal email as the ID. “Userid or password is incorrect”. No surprise – if I didn’t even remember I had the account, it’s no real surprise that I can’t remember the password. So I go through the ‘forgot my password’ option, type in my personal e-mail address again, and it tells me “Username not known.” So now I’m really confused. I just got an email telling me that my subscription had been renewed, but apparently for an account that doesn’t exist…
I give up and decide to just call Microsoft. The “Contact us” link on their Website is mis-labeled – it should be called “get lost in recursive redirects hell”, but after going through the “self-help” options, a list of articles they think might help (they didn’t), and several chats with auto-bots, I finally get into a queue that eventually shows me a phone number I can call, to be placed in a queue for a call-back, which then did indeed call me back an hour or so later, before placing me in another queue for a bit longer – just to make sure I really wanted to talk to someone – before finally connecting me with an honest-to-god human! And one with an American accent that I could actually understand! Praise be! I couldn’t have been more grateful if Bill Gates himself had turned up at my house and taken care of my problem himself.
So I explained what had happened, and how I was just trying to cancel the Xbox Live subscription. I gave her my personal email ID (the one to which the renewal notice was sent), and she somehow managed to find the account. Apparently, what had happened was that because the subscription had never officially been cancelled, they just kept on re-trying, and as soon as I posted a valid credit card to my account, they picked up on that. That sounds reasonable, I guess…although to keep trying for 3 or 4 years, seems a bit excessive.
I asked her why I couldn’t see the subscription on my account, and she pointed out that it wasn’t on my account. My personal email was just the secondary email on another account. I asked her what the primary email was on that account, thinking that it must be my professional email, somehow, and she said that the primary email was actually an old email account of my son’s (which he stopped using years ago, which is why he never saw the renewal failure notifications). In fact, my professional email address was in no way connected to this Microsoft Account (the one that had the subscription to Xbox Live). Furthermore, my Microsoft Account (which it turns out is the only one I have) does not have my personal email connected to it either (again, I like to compartmentalize). So how the hell did Microsoft know that one account was connected to the other?? And what gave them the authority to start charging the credit card on one of those accounts for subscriptions that were set up on the other account, and then discontinued (albeit not cancelled) several years ago?? Clearly Watson is even smarter than their advertisements claim!
I did get the Xbox Live subscription cancelled, and I removed myself from my son’s account (he’s over 18 now, and no longer a minor, so I don’t need to vouch for him any more), but I’m not convinced I have heard the last of this. Who knows, sometime in the future, when my sons kids get an Xbox 3000 X, they may well be able to charge their holo-purchases to my Bitcoin account just because Microsoft has determined that we’re blood relatives…
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