Xbox 360 Owners: Never Use a Credit Card
A few months ago, my house was broken into, and one of the items stolen was an Xbox 360. This morning, I got an interesting email in my inbox:
“Purchase confirmation for Xbox Live 3 mo. Gold Membership”
Obviously, since I no longer own an Xbox, this struck me as unusual. I called Microsoft right away to tell them what happened, but they’ve been completely uncooperative. They will not refund the charge, they will not give me any information about the IP or location of the console, and they won’t disable it from being used in the future. All they would do is cancel my account.
What’s worse though, is that this membership got charged to my credit card. Now, it’s possible that I saved the credit card number on the machine, but I never do that anywhere else so it would have been accidental if I did. The creepy thing though, is that I asked the guy if the thieves could access my full credit card number, and he said “yes.” Apparently Microsoft stores credit card numbers in plain text on the device. This is blatantly irresponsible, and unheard of in e-commerce. If I or anyone else I work with ever did that on a job, we’d be fired on the spot. Microsoft should know better.
If you have an Xbox 360 and a Live account, my advice to you is to buy the prepaid subscription cards at the store. I’m never giving Microsoft my credit card number again.
