XBOX One microtransactions

Geordiegirlinnorfolk

Can anyone tell me if they have managed to reclaim money from Microsoft for XBOX One ingame microtransactions?

This appears to be a real problem with the new XBOX One - a problem I didn't realise until my bank statement arrived last week. My Son has managed to spend £830 in five weeks on FIFA 14 through ingame microtransactions. You might think why did I not have any payments password protected? but my card details have been held on the XBOX 360 for the last 4 years without a problem. If my son wants to buy something, he asks permission and gives me the money. Its always worked well and I trusted him not to exploit that. Enter the XBOX One and he's playing happily, buying and selling players with (he thought) points he had accrued. He was actually buying points but didn't realise he was spending actual money - my money!

Microsoft has now taken my card details off the system but refuse to refund any money as they say its EA Games that took the money. EA Games of course say that its Microsoft and my bank don't want to know either. They can all see that this is not normal behaviour for that account but nobody wants to help.

Has anybody out there managed to get their money back? I feel sick to think that they've got £830 of my money!

ifstar

You can only try, but I wouldn't hold out an awful lot of hope. It does come up and say that it will cost money.
At least you have got the credit card removed - much cheaper to buy xbox live and points online.

DCFC79

OP you really shouldn't have had your card details stored on the console, in future either use paypal or buy them cards that are loaded with a monetry value eg £10/£20 and enter the code on the website.

I dont like your chnaces of getting a refund but you can try.

How often do you check your account ?

Why did you not do something when you first saw the payments leave your account ?

criboo

Keep pressing them for a refund saying the likelihood of this happening has increased without warning to you owing to recent trends of in-game payments and additional opportunities for them due to the new generation of consoles. Furthermore, check whether there are any caps or stringent checks in place to warn/prevent you that you are spending money (maybe by having a look at the system directly yourself) and complain that your son couldn't have reasonably believed he was spending ~£170 per week on average.

Similar cases involving people's kids on iPhones and tablets etc have resulted in refunds and I'm confident Microsoft or EA are able to refund you.

Finally, try and contact some online game journalism sites, the big ones such as IGN and Gamespot have probably come across similar things and see if anyone there is willing to offer advice. It's maybe a bit of a long shot, but if they get back to you, their advice could be helpful.

Good luck!

Chris

bluenoseam

Oh dear, parent makes a stupid decision, continually makes that stupid decision & when that stupid decision bites parent on the backside, it's blame someone else & try to claw the money back.

Criboo - no journalist will look at this and help, they'll look at this and think "idiot" given how widely publicised the fact you DO NOT KEEP YOUR CARD DETAILS ON THE CONSOLE is. That's not techie, that's not even remotely secret, that's basic common sense.

Neither EA nor Microsoft have done anything wrong, your SON did by continuously buying stuff, so why should EA or Microsoft suffer for something that's not their problem.

I'd type the instructions how to remove cards but it appears MS have done you a favour & done it for you - from here on out, use the pre paid cards.

houseimprover

Geordiegirlinnorfolk wrote: »

Can anyone tell me if they have managed to reclaim money from Microsoft for XBOX One ingame microtransactions?

This appears to be a real problem with the new XBOX One - a problem I didn't realise until my bank statement arrived last week. My Son has managed to spend £830 in five weeks on FIFA 14 through ingame microtransactions. You might think why did I not have any payments password protected? but my card details have been held on the XBOX 360 for the last 4 years without a problem. If my son wants to buy something, he asks permission and gives me the money. Its always worked well and I trusted him not to exploit that. Enter the XBOX One and he's playing happily, buying and selling players with (he thought) points he had accrued. He was actually buying points but didn't realise he was spending actual money - my money!

Microsoft has now taken my card details off the system but refuse to refund any money as they say its EA Games that took the money. EA Games of course say that its Microsoft and my bank don't want to know either. They can all see that this is not normal behaviour for that account but nobody wants to help.

Has anybody out there managed to get their money back? I feel sick to think that they've got £830 of my money!

It has the amounts of money under the points so it is fairly obvious, plus were you not getting emails for each transaction?

criboo

bluenoseam wrote: »

Oh dear, parent makes a stupid decision, continually makes that stupid decision & when that stupid decision bites parent on the backside, it's blame someone else & try to claw the money back.

Criboo - no journalist will look at this and help, they'll look at this and think "idiot" given how widely publicised the fact you DO NOT KEEP YOUR CARD DETAILS ON THE CONSOLE is. That's not techie, that's not even remotely secret, that's basic common sense.

Neither EA nor Microsoft have done anything wrong, your SON did by continuously buying stuff, so why should EA or Microsoft suffer for something that's not their problem.

I'd type the instructions how to remove cards but it appears MS have done you a favour & done it for you - from here on out, use the pre paid cards.

You'd be surprised how useful the gaming journo's can be when it comes to this stuff, they tend to be more public focused than conventional journalists. You're very cynical.

Keep pestering people, as I've said, there are numerous cases of people's kids spending money on things like phone apps and microtransactions with the parents unaware they are able to do this and getting their money back. Just stick at it.

bluenoseam

A lot of it is down to exposure to it, lets be fair, in the course of the 7+ years I did this for a living I've heard this story enough times to be able to say if I had a penny for every pound involved I'd have been able to retire at 25. That's as a single member of staff in a retail shop who knows & understands the market, I've seen it so often - heck I've even to a significantly smaller extent been part of it.

But there's a base fact here, the mistake is 100% on the point of the consumer - that is stone cold hard no getting away from it fact. The customer screwed up by allowing their payment details to be retained despite numerous warnings to remove them over the course of the last 5+ years. They are under no right to get their money back - purchases were made using payment details left unsupervised, that's what's happened here.

You can dress it up whatever way you want to try to lessen the blame or shift it onto big corporations, but neither Microsoft or EA left the card details on the machine. That's essentially like saying "oh just keep hold of all the details Mr. Asda, I'll use them again soon enough" - you simply wouldn't do it because logic would tell you it's a VERY STUPID THING TO DO.

Am I a little cynical, yes probably so, but it's a classic example of mistake being made, serious consequences happening as a result & suddenly who's fault is it? Is it mine for making the mistake or someone elses because the mistake was there to be made? When you purchase EA points/coins you have to confirm EACH AND EVERY PURCHASE, whereby it will tell you how much that purchase is. These days it's not even as if it's "that'll be 1200 MS points" - it's all real life currency these days, there's no ambiguity involved.

To spend £830 on EA coins takes a whole hell of a lot of time & effort - that's not a mistake right there where you had no warning, that's a significant number of confirmations. I know every time I buy a track in Rocksmith I have to press the A button twice to confirm the purchase. At the second press it offers me the T&C's of the purchase (which is bog standard & includes "NO REFUNDS" in some form) by hitting purchase it confirms you agree to those T&C's. Ignorance is no defence, all the XBL purchases work that way both in game & through the Xbox store - that's the way it works by design. You can't rack up £830 worth of spend without being asked to confirm it - that simply does not happen, period!

DCFC79

Can the OP enable a password to be required everytime a purchase to be made (hindsight is a wonderful), I believe you can but Ive not had any reason to enable it.

vyle

DCFC79 wrote: »

Can the OP enable a password to be required everytime a purchase to be made (hindsight is a wonderful), I believe you can but Ive not had any reason to enable it.

In a word: Yes.

The Xbox allows the creation of an adult Xbox live account, which can then branch off into child accounts.

The child account is restricted into what it can do, how payments work and all the rest. It's what OP should have had from the start. You could do it on the xbox 360, so there is no excuse for not knowing.

As annoying as it is for OP, it's the same as giving their kid £800 in cash and sending him into toys R us and being surprised when he came out with an empty wallet and bags full of toys.

You can say "oh but he didn't know" all your like, and "he's not done it before" but you left the account with the card details on the xbox AND left it open to purchase, and he could have done the exact same thing on the 360, he just chose not to.

StuC75

as commented elsewhere the Widows live email address that the xbox account is registered would have received an email through confirming each transaction..

Parent & Child accounts aside it is easy on any account on the xbox to restrict purchases to need a code inputting - as I did on my sons xbox one account when I set our consoles for download sharing..