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Well kids, nitnit did a bad thing. dun dun dun. After his initial free 1 month of gold was up, he used a very wealthy relative's credit card to purchase a year of XBL. Unfortunately about a month later the relative noticed and called up microsoft and told them to deactivate it.
Nitnit knew that his gold was turned off since M$ told him, but what he didn't know was that his account was actually "locked". He continued to play offline with Xbox Live Silver, enjoying some games like Bioshock and whatnot, until he purchased Shadowrun and wanted to play it online.
So, having learned his lesson that people check their credit card statements, nitnit bought a 50$ 1 year prepaid card. He plugs in the number, and it says "an error has occured try again later" so he tries on the console, no luck, but he reads that this happens when there is a server error, so he decides to not fret and to just wait.
Another day passes, he tries both - no luck. On the third day, after 2 failures, nitnit calls Xbox Live Tech support, only to learn that his account has been "frozen".
This means that he can never change his status to gold, and cannot add M$ play points. Even if he removes both credit cards and uses the prepaid card it doesn't matter, he's stuck at silver.
So, by now you're thinking "suck it up thief, make a new account", okay okay, but here's the kicker.
The tech support guy himself told me that I could reuse the same credit card numbers if I really wanted to start up a new account.
What's the moral of the story? Microsoft doesn't actually give a s**t about the credit card's security, they just want to use it as an excuse for me to lose the 6$ of points I have laying around, to replay my games for achievements (since they are non transferable), rebuy any arcade games with online play, and rebuy all DLCs - why? Because those are stuck to the account that they froze.
Seriously, I learned my lesson and I did something dumb, but shouldn't they have just not allowed those numbers to be used again? Also, for those of you who care my new gamertag is
metaSHODAN - and yes, this time I'll be using my own cards.
tl;dr - microsoft freezes accounts for credit card theft, but doesnt block the numbers from being used to start a new account - is this an oversight? or just an excuse for us to repurchase arcade games and DLCs?
edit: There are also reports of them freezing people who trash talk too much online or hack/mod online games to their advantage - they don't just freeze them from the respective game, but they lock the whole account, meaning people have to set up a new account, buy all their old content. Again - oversight? or abusing members for more money and calling it protection?
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