In the meantime they bought 10,000 more points. Everyone told me to cancel my credit card. I thought this was good advice. So I called my Visa card company (CIBC. Also now on my blacklist) and was confronted with an ornery and quite likely stoned individual who served me with the following anecdote: a woman pre-approved payments, not unlike me with my Xbox, to her local city hall for tax and fee payments. She cancels her card. 8 months after the card is canceled, she gets a bill for the pre-authorized payments she forgot to change at the city hall. Thus, it would be pointless to cancel your card. Being somewhat green in this area, I went against my better judgement and the advice of my peers and decide to side with the person that actually worked for the company. He should know about these things, right? I would pay for that trust.

So I get on the horn again to Microsoft, jump through a ton of hoops and spend enough time on hold to fill out a BBB complaint. When I finally get to someone not working off a script, I am told that it can take up to 30 days to remove credit card information from your account, and up to 5 years for that information to be purged from Microsoft servers.

This is clearly unacceptable.

From here on I would go to talk to 3 other supervisors and multiple tiers of customer service. Someone called about the BBB complaint, but I have not heard back. Finally, I got in touch with someone for them to investigate the fraudulent charges. She told me that because they had bought Microsoft Points, they could not give me a refund because they, quite simply, did not do refunds for points, and told met to refute the claims with my credit card company, who would then in turn file a report with them. A polite way to say sod off if I have ever heard one.