Xbox Live: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
Xbox Live has been the undisputed ruler of online gaming communities to date. Beginning as a way to play games with friends over an internet connection, it has become much more as today, Xbox Live allows gamers to download movie trailers, buy arcade content & add-on to games, play new game demos…Â Xbox Live can be so much fun but it can also becomes your worst nightmare.
One thing I do not like about the xbox live network is that whatever content you buy for your gamertag, it can only be used for that gamertag and if you buy Microsoft Points, they cannot be gifted either. Because of those restrictions I think it makes a gamertag the target of numerous frauds which can result in you devoid of your Xbox live account.
A while back, my son got conned into giving out 1500 Microsoft points to access the 10th Prestige Lobby for COD Modern Warfare 2. He is just a kid and he did not know any better. I am often working on my laptop in his room so I can most often hear what is going on while he is playing. Some random kid came into the chat party offering those the 10th Prestige Lobby in exchange of 1500 Microsoft Points and let me tell you, some of them sound very convincing. Within the hour he was offered the 10th Prestige Lobby 3 times!
My son was upset about losing his points for nothing so I decided to give a call to xbox live customer support and report the person who took the Microsoft points. I was advised to post a review.
Whenever you come across anyone carrying out on xbox live you can simply post a game player review that will give rise to getting these individuals eventually suspended. Whenever a sufficient amount of individuals post reviews, steps will be performed by Xbox 360 Live’s employees. The issue with the review system is that it’s made up of pre-made answers and you have to chose one only. None of the answers apply to fraud and you cannot add any personal comments which to me it makes this system useless.
I argued the case for an hour on the phone. The xbox live staff told me not to worry as everything was tracked on the xbox live network. Well that kid still has an active profile and for all I know he probably conned 100s of other kids to give him points since no one could actually report him.
Now, we have another issue. My son has several gamertags and has spend quite a fair bit of his pocket money on them. One of them has just been stolen after he just added a 3-month xbox live gold membership to it. So here I am again on the phone with Xbox live customer support to try and solve the issue. I have to admit, after the first incident I did not think it was even worth calling but I did and they seem to take the incident serioulsy and the call has been escalated to a full investigation.
My advice as a parent, because after all we are the ones paying for it, make sure you kids have a not so easy to guess password and explain to them to not give it out even to their best buddies. Check out the option of their email address to make it difficult to recover the password with hard to guess answers and to expire every 72 days. You also have the options to buy prepaid memberships and Microsoft points from leading stores so there is no need to store your credit card details on the console.
Xbox live is fun but play it safe.
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29 Apr 2011, 6:26 pm
Rattling nice design and good written content , very little else we require : D.