Compared to some Xbox Live users' months of waiting, Susan Taylor's week-long ordeal with Microsoft's ugly unauthorized access problem doesn't seem like much. Seven days isn't a terribly long time for customer support to resolve an account issue on Xbox 360 -- in fact, Microsoft told IGN the ideal wait is "days, if not hours." Taylor's case was about average, then, except for some major differentiating factors. Never mind that it embodied a perfect storm of every worst case scenario. Forget about her blog, Hacked on Xbox, blowing up online. What stood out to Taylor was how Microsoft went about helping her.
"There's clearly hundreds and hundreds of people going through the exact same thing, and they're going to have to wait in line and hopefully they'll get something resolved," says Taylor. "Just because I spoke out and happen to use Twitter, Microsoft is treating me as a special case, and that infuriates me more than anything else."
Taylor is an active member within the Xbox community. She's an Ambassador, a role knowledgeable Xbox users apply for to aid others in an official, affiliated capacity. She knows her stuff, she looks out for community members, and she's heard about these "unauthorized access" problems before. Now that she's a victim of account hacking, she's started a blog as a bastion for victims to commiserate. This isn't a haven where you just share stories about money stolen from your account, though. Susan Taylor is collecting nightmarish anecdotes surrounding Microsoft's faulty security and customer support. She posted an email address for submissions front and center on the web page, and her inbox exploded overnight. Some stories have happy endings. Most do not. One writer had $1,900 stolen. Another had been waiting months without word from Microsoft about when to expect a resolution, while someone else had their blocked account restored without any notification.
Incidentally, soliciting negativity for publication on a booming blog and in social media is a great way to get Microsoft's attention.
"I got a call from a guy called Jonathan, who was part of the Customer Advocacy and Exceptions Management team at Microsoft," Taylor tells me. "He said he'd seen my Twitter account and had followed the blog and everything else." Given the extreme downward spiral of her case, Microsoft "started bending over backwards. He said to me he wanted me to create a new Windows Live ID with a different email address. He was going to transfer my Xbox Live account to that new Windows Live ID." She had never heard of this solution before, and had no idea transferring the entirety of one account to another was something Microsoft could (or would) do. Neither did I.
During her solution process, Taylor logged onto Xbox Live to discover her account was still accessible -- Microsoft told her it'd been blocked. As it turns out, one of the Gamertags credited with stealing her money showed up on her friends list. After messaging the user, Taylor discovered the Polish gamer had outright bought the account at an online auction. Her money was used to fund subscriptions and purchases for new Xbox Live accounts hackers turned around for a quick buck. Taylor wasn't alone. The user who'd sold the account had hundreds more for sale.