Dear 343 & anyone it may concern,
On November 25th, 2012, I had been working very hard on a college term paper. My girlfriend and I sat down around lunch time to watch “The Office” on Netflix together (as we do daily). Everything so far was okay. I had just received my very own copy of the Halo 4 Collector’s Edition for my birthday on the 21st. As tempted as I was to play it I remained diligent in finishing what I needed to get done with my paper. My girlfriend and her mother had left town, and I continued to work on my paper. At around 3:00 PM Central Standard Time, I decided, satisfied with the work I had completed, to finally sit back, relax, and dive in to Halo 4. To my astonishment, upon turning my Xbox on, I received a message telling me that my account had been logged into another Xbox console. I thought it was weird, so I decided to clear the cache on my Xbox, thinking it may have been a glitch as I am/was in the Fall 2012 Dashboard Beta. After clearing the Cache the problem persisted. However, I quickly logged into my bank account and noticed charges made that day. I frantically called Microsoft support. After being on hold for what seemed like an eternity, I finally was able to talk to an associate. I relayed them my problems and they told me that my account would be frozen, and that they would start the process of refunding me for the fraudulent charges.
Upon checking my account online at xbox.com, I noticed that my account had been tampered with extremely. Every single Xbox 360 game that I had ever played had every achievement unlocked; Borderlands 2 (which I have never played on my Xbox 360) had every single achievement except three. I also had every Halo 4 achievement which a majority of the Spartan Ops ones were not available yet. The 320 Microsoft Points I had were gone, as well as all of my friends. The associate said that an investigation would begin as soon as possible to see who had tampered with my account. I made the request to have my account be "rolled back/reset” to the 24th of November. A note of that was made, and the associate told me that the investigation would take up to six days to complete. I told them that I wanted to seek legal action if they found the party responsible for this. After spending almost 5 hours on and off the phone with support, I felt satisfied with the treatment I received. I was still a little upset that my account was subject to such an attack, (which an associate told me this is the worst hacking case they had ever seen). My online and real identity was stolen.
On the 27th of November, I logged in to xbox.com to see if anything with my account had been fixed. To my amazement, I saw that my recent activity showed that I had just played Call of Duty: Black Ops II. I do not even own that game. I thought that my account was locked. Upset, I called support again to make sure they were aware of what was going on. After relaying what had happened to an associate, they assured me that my account was locked – and it was. They then told me that the investigation would take twelve days, not six. Now, with my account locked I felt that I was more secure. An hour or so later I received an email notifying me that the investigation had been completed and I was given a code for 100 Microsoft points. Upon checking my account on xbox.com, to my amazement, nothing had been done and my Gamerscore still remained the 76k it had been hacked to. Upset I called support yet again. This time I relayed my entire story to a supervisor. He told me that he would elevate my issue to “Tier 3”, and that everything would be taken care of. I told him how frustrated I was that almost $200 worth of fraudulent purchases were made with my account and all that could be done was to compensate me with 100 MSP.
I recently contacted support again on December 2, 2012, one week after the incident, to get a follow up with the status of my account and its investigation. The associate informed me that Tier 3 does not handle phone calls, but that I should expect a phone call either Monday or Tuesday of that week. On December 6th, I received an email stating that I would be contacted by an associate in the Microsoft Customer Advocacy and Exception Management Team. We are currently working on getting my account back in order. One issue is that they will have to wipe my entire gaming history so my Gamerscore will be 0.
I want to ask something as I found all of the terminals, beat the campaign, put in all of the Waypoint codes I could, and I am at SR 28 am I going to be at subject to the ban hammer? Is there any way that I could get into contact with anyone at 343 to have my issue referred to them. I can forward my agents contact information and see if I can get everything resolved. Even if it is to get my service record for Halo 4 reset and any other Halo game for that matter (as I am sure I would hit snags in Reach & 3). I just want to make sure that when I get online and start playing I will be okay to play without getting banned.
I apologize for the huge wall of text, as this issue is very important to me.
Thank you for your time.
Laetteralus