An Xbox gamer in Brazil recently posted their tale on Reddit about how Microsoft deleted their account after it was hijacked. Worse, the company then forced him to re-purchase all the games that they had purchased, including Minecraft. Well, the gamer clearly wasn’t having any of that and proceeded to take the company to court.
The gamer, who goes by the handle Ordo_Liberal, said that they contacted their lawyer thereafter to initiate legal proceedings against Xbox. As a bit of background, Ordo’s says that the issue began back in April, when their Microsoft account was compromised despite 2FA being enabled. The thing is, Ordo doesn’t clarify if their 2FA was sent via email or through SMS, but either way were considered less secure.
Update on my last post "Microsoft deleted my acc and told me to buy my games again". I sued their asses and won! They have to restore my acc with all my games + pay me 400$USD. Translation in comment.
byu/Ordo_Liberal inxbox
In a small defense of Microsoft, and like many other companies, it has been pushing users towards passkeys, and away from traditional passwords for precisely this kind of scenario. That said, the decision to pull the plug on the account by deleting it completely seems like a nuclear option.
Returning on point, Ordo says that Microsoft received a follow-up message from Microsoft Brazil’s support team, saying that the earlier response had been automated and that the case remained under investigation. One commenter on Reddit responded by saying that they too were in a similar situation, received an identical message, and were even signed off by a support representative of the same name. Clearly, a boilerplate response.
Brazilian law was on Ordo’s side, much to the chagrin of Microsoft; the Windows OS owner had an army of 12 lawyers, plus a 300-page filing, and it still lost the fight. For Ordo, Brazilian consumer protection laws mean that public defenders were able to take on their case at no charge.
The Rio de Janeiro court ruled that Xbox had 15 days to restore Ordo’s account and purchases, or face mounting fines, the latter capable of reaching hundreds of dollars. Additionally, the company was ordered to pay Ordo US$400 (~RM1,632) in moral damages. To a company like Microsoft, that’s very obviously petty cash or, in street slang, chump change.
The bigger takeaway of this story, in our opinion, is that corporations like Microsoft and its gaming division, Xbox, can’t just make unilateral decisions about a consumer’s account and then think they can get away with it.
