Digital Thieves Scam Millions From Xbox Live Accounts
No matter how good a free online deal sounds, if it asks you for any personal information, it's probably better to just let it slide by. That's the lesson thousands of Xbox Live members in the UK are learning today after The Sun reported millions of dollars being pilfered from bank accounts. The victims fell foul to various phishing scams asking for information in exchange for prizes such as Microsoft Points and free games.
Information in hand, thieves slowly stolen money from their prey over the course of a few weeks, with most people losing around 100 pounds (about 155 American doll-hairs). The scams were only discovered when multiple login attempts from different sources locked out thousands of players from their accounts, alerting both players and Microsoft that something was...phishy.
Remember kids, always keep your information a secret! Before you enter any confidential information, always check the website and avoid any "deals" that require passwords, credit card data, or social security numbers that don't come from trusted online sources or stores.
Dryden
Posted to Video Games on 22 November 2011
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: Microsoft, scam, Xbox 360, Xbox Live
I was a victim of this, and I'm not even ON Xbox Live. (I have a username set up on my personal MSN/Live account, but as I have never even owned an Xbox, I've never used it, and my debit card information wasn't on it either.) My bank graciously helped me recover my stolen funds within a week of it happening, however. I'm almost skeptical to think that it was even related to this event at all - I was actually "phished" via a Zune account, which is another service I've never even touched before (and never will), but being similarly atrocious and Micro$oft-esque, it would make sense to say they're at least related somehow. I'm still absolutely lost on how they would have acquired such information, since the only places I ever actually use my debit card are for services like PSN and Steam. Everything else is Paypal or bust.
From now on I think I will ONLY use services that support Paypal + VeriSign verification. I'm too poor to afford this happening again. OTL