A few days after the original post (on the 16th) I got an automated email in russian from Xbox support

Dear user <my IRL name>!
This letter is confirmation of a successful switch to XBOX Live account from Russia to the United Kingdom.
To contact Customer Support, please visit https://billing.microsoft.com and select “Contact Support” on the left navigation bar.
Thank you for using Web Services Microsoft Online Services.
Microsoft Customer Support Services

“Excellent” I thought “They’ve finally figured out how to change my region, maybe I’ll get my account back! Maybe I already have my account back!”

Oh me, oh stupid, stupid me.

I called the phone support line and got told the email didn’t really mean anything and that the account was still under investigation and yadda yadda yadda. Then on the 20th I got the by now weekly “This will take three more weeks to resolve” email.

That I’d been getting these emails for four weeks was not an irony the phone support seemed willing to discuss.

So fast forward to January 25th when an exciting development happens!

Dear customer to Xbox LIVE

we completed a survey related to unauthorized access to your Xbox LIVE account. As part of the investigation, we have temporarily assumed control of your Xbox LIVE account and the associated Windows Live ID. This precaution was necessary to protect you and your account until you will not be possible riottenerne control.

If the phrasing in that mail seems a bit strange it is because I had to pass it through google translate from the original Italian. One quick phonecall later and I established with the xbox live phone support that yes indeed, the investigation team had restored my account but had set the region and language to Italy. They had also only restored one third of the stolen Microsoft points. They promptly locked the account again so they could change the region and the support engineer on the phone was a bit puzzled by the partial return of the points since I had been told I would get a full return. They assured me that it would definitely take no more than two weeks this time.

Two weeks later (around Feb 10th) I called the support line and was informed that when they said “two weeks” they meant “two weeks from the time the investigation team pick up the case” I’m not kidding.

Fortunately the investigation team had only taken a week to get to my case and since they had a ten working day limit to deal with these issues I should definitely have it dealt with by the following friday.

On the 16th of February I got a mail with codes to replace the remaining missing Microsoft points so credit where it is due, they did that.

On the 17th of February I got another mail, this time in english, which is always a good sign.

Dear Xbox LIVE Customer,

We have completed our investigation of the unauthorised access to your Xbox LIVE account. As part of our investigation, we took temporary control of your Xbox LIVE account and the associated Windows Live ID. This was done to protect your account until you could take back control of it.

Use the following steps to take control of your Xbox LIVE account:

Needless to say the instructions that followed didn’t work as the account was still locked and I can’t access it. Also the contact information appears to still be set to whatever info was set by the person who stole it and now Xbox phone support can only give extremely limited feedback to me because I can’t answer the questions about my own account properly.

During the next day or two there was a lengthy discussion with Xbox Live Support on twitter where my problem was “solved” (i.e. not solved) then escalated again and I was told “Ok, it may take a few days to hear back. ^PJ”

That was a week ago now. They probably appreciate my patience but it will take up to three more weeks to resolve.

Edit: I can’t believe I forgot this bit - I got an email asking me for my feedback on their customer service at the start of this week. Then a few days later a reminder to fill in the feedback form. It might be me being crazy but I suspect you’ll get better feedback by requesting it after you’ve fixed the issue, not when you’ve done nothing but make an arse of things at every step.

Picture the scene, it is September 16th, I’m home from work after a long commute, I’ve had a bite to eat and I’m sitting down to check my email, follow up on a few things, hang out with my kids, maybe be a massive nerd and do some coding. I opened up my email account and had an unwelcome surprise.

The email above arrived a few minutes before I had logged into my email.

I don’t live in Russia, I’ve never been near Russia and I don’t plan on going to Russia. Figuring that someone was acting silly buggers I immediately logged into Xbox Live from my laptop (no harm in being over cautious, possibly my desktop PC had been compromised with a keylogger or the like). I was able to log in, so they hadn’t changed my password but the language settings were now Russian and I wasn’t familiar enough with the interface to revert the settings and change my password (also the 12,600 microsoft points I had treated myself to a few days earlier were all gone) so I called Xbox Live support. If I’d known then what I know now I would have written off the microsoft points and carried on trying to change the bloody password.

I spoke to a terribly nice chap in Xbox Live support, informed him of the problem, gave him the assload of information required to verify the account as your own and get it locked. He informed me that the points had been spent on Call of Duty World at War map packs and similar stuff (he specifically mentioned the CoD WaW map packs). The support technician told me the account was locked, it would take approximately 20 working days to get it resolved but that in fairly clear cut cases like this it would probably take less. I gave them an alternate email address to contact me (if your account is being investigated they can’t contact you through the email address associated with the xbox live account) and started the wait.

It is worth mentioning at this point that my password was decent, it was noted as a “strong” password when I tested it, I didn’t use it anywhere else, it was unique to Xbox Live. I have no idea how they got it.

Roughly a month later this arrives.

I called Xbox Live support to confirm what was going on but they assured me that the fraud team were looking into it and that I should get feedback soon. They appreciated my patience. Appreciating my patience was soon to become a recurring theme.The reason for this delay was supposedly because the region had been changed to Russia and this made things more complicated.

I called a few more times to see if there was anything I could do to speed things along but generally the response was that they appreciated my patience and they’d be back in touch.

Roughly another month passed and then unexpectedly I got a mail in Russian on November 13th. This is the translation (via google translate).

So I called Xbox live to say “Hey guys, does this mean you’ve finally dealt with it?” but no, it seemed the investigation had moved along and the account had been escalated and highlighted to the investigations team but if I’m entirely honest I don’t remember much more of the explanation because I was too busy being angry. I was assured that they appreciated my patience though, so that was okay.

I got an advert for the Kinect a day or two later, so at least my email account was able to be used for advertisements from them.

Another month later (December 16th) after no further correspondence from Xbox Live I contacted them again and asked to speak to a manager. They complied and the manager informed me that I had had no correspondence from Xbox Live because they simply do not contact people in relation to active investigations and that the delay was due to the fact that the region had been changed to Russia.

The biggest surprise was this - There is a restriction on changing your Xbox live region, you can only do it once per year. If the excuse I was offered is to be believed Xbox Live support are unable to bypass this restriction.

He reassured me that they appreciated my patience though and said that while there was no way to determine how much longer it would take, typically for a case at this stage of the investigation and one that had taken this long he imagined it would take another fortnight at most.

The next day I got another voucher for a month of Xbox Live access in this email.

(Note that now the nature of the problem has changed - there isn’t a delay in processing the complaint, now they’re trying to put together an engineering solution to get my account back to me. An engineering solution). I bet they appreciated my patience.

Then things started getting a little bit groundhog day.

On December 23rd I got a mail saying it may take up to three more weeks to resolve the issue. Then another identical mail a week later on the 30th. Then another one on January 14th (three weeks after the first one). Oh and another month membership code on January 6th.

So, December 23rd

December 30th

(Not really sure why gmail occasionally makes the text purple)

January 6th (another month of Xbox Live)

January 14th

They never *once* claimed they appreciated my patience, maybe they don’t appreciate it any more.

I guess if I take the claims at face value I’m waiting another three weeks at least to get the account back but after four months of being told the problem is almost dealt with and should only take another few weeks I think I’ve had enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that they send the Xbox live codes, they’re borderline worthless to me until I get my account back because I’m not making a new one and spending weeks trying to track down the usernames of all my friends and I’m certainly not making a new one so I can buy new DLC and have two separate sets of licenses.

On the other hand, FOUR MONTHS to deal with this is pathetic. Repeatedly trying to make excuses about how the region is set to Russia and they can’t change it back is quite a feeble rationale. This is not a problem that takes four months to resolve. This was a clear case of theft of an account and they’re doing nothing to resolve it.