I like playing Halo. I purchase Halo 4, enjoy the campaign, complain about multiplayer, participate in the forums a little, care nothing about armor and how “my spartan” looks. I enjoy playing the game and care nothing about all of the different armor stuff. It just seems childish to me (coming from a guy who plays video games…yeah…I know…LOL). Then I get some random email from an email domain entitled “engage.xbox.com”. It goes into my spam folder and looks like some phishing scam. No info on Waypoint about how the codes were going to be emailed, no information in the XBL forums about it, your posts on the XBL forums don’t get posted because they have to go through moderators first (it’s been 8 hours since I posted my question there about this suspicious looking email). So I have to come to the community forums on Waypoint and wade through dozens of posts to piece the details together. I guess I have one word for this…debacle. Okay, maybe a second word…unprofessional.
I mean, for a company as large as Microsoft who deals with security issues every single day, you would think that they’d have done a MUCH, MUCH better job in informing everyone how this was going to work, rather than sending out a random email that looks just like what I train people everyday not to read…an email from an unknown email domain that LOOKS official, with the promise of a free gift just by “clicking here”. This is a classic phishing technique. How in the world did Microsoft’s security group let this go forward? We security types work hard to keep our users informed on things NOT to do and Microsoft does something like that. I wish I could say I was surprised.