Its nothing but a scam. I purchased a month of Xbox live using a debit credit card, and after the month was up they unexpectedly continued to charge the debit card. Luckily I had no money on the card so I didn't lose any money. You would think that if you chose the option to only get Xbox live for a month, you only get a month of usage. But no, they continue to charge you even though you never wanted it. What I want to know is, what the fuck is the point of having the option to choose a month subscription when they just continue to charge you anyway?! Why is it there?
Its a complete scam, and they only do it because they know they can get away with it.
Now my account is disconnected from Xbox live completely. Thanks Microsoft.

Go buy a 12 month card for $50 you even get 1 month free.

You probably didn't read the small print.  The whole industry - especially phones, do this sort of thing.  I just prefer not to use a credit card where possible.

All services like this are recurring these days.  You have to cancel if you don't want them to charge anymore.

They offer a month instead of a year because a month is a smaller one time fee, and maybe you want to subscribe for a month then cancel.  Why would a year make any more sense, maybe if they offered a 'forever' service level you'd be right in thinking one month meant JUST one month.

I also suffer from this issue, but apparently buying a card and entering it fixes the problem. Maybe when I actually have money I will buy one.

you purchased it on the 360? yet it clearly tells you that i know of when you do this that its a recurring charge, a monthly membership...its not a rip off or a scam its your own inabbility to read obvious things.
I'm sorry for being so defensive but comeon it says monthly membership that i know of when you signup on a 360...

It's your fault for the most part. They almost always throw you on a recurring subscription if you pay by credit card. If you have a credit card and you didn't know about this kind of thing... then you are probably too young for one. Or just... not an intelligent consumer.

I've bout a 3 month card and it counted it as 13 months. Since then I always buy cards

Yeah, this isn't even an issue of very small and hidden fine print.  It is pretty obvious and they say so right up front.  It's like World of Warcraft or Netflix or something, where it would be annoying to have to go put your credit card back in every month.

I always buy the Xbox LIVE cards from my local retailer.  My friend had the same problem, but I heard that you can cancel it somehow.

That sucks about them trying to hook you for the extra month.  It does day pretty clearly "monthly" as opposed to "1-month" but it's an honest enough mistake to make.  The bigger issue that I have with  with Xbox Live is the hassel that you have to go through if you want to cancel.  They make it so easy to sign up for the service.  It's all right there in the dashboard.  Outside of turning the thing on and Pressing a button to play the disc, it's the easiest thing you can do on the machine.  However if you want to cancel you can't do it from the console.  In fact when last I checked, you couldn't even do it online at all.  Making it more difficult to discontinue the service may not be an outright scam, but it is pretty scummy.

I could see this being problematic if you recently bought a 360, but yeah, it's done all the time with other stuff.

still bullshit they make you pay. lets say you only have halo 3 online, you basically just spent $110 for a videogame. 

Yeah, it's pretty dumb, you have to call to have it cancelled, but I don't really mind because I use XBL every day for Halo 3. And despite the fact that you can get 12 month XBL cards for like 30 bucks on Amazon, it's just too much trouble for me to cancel it. I realize that I'm the problem.

Oh, yeah. They're kind enough to automatically renew it for you without your consent. ;)

Yeah, and you can't even cancel the account online or on your 360. You have to cancel it over the phone which takes way too long due to how many questions you have to answer.

Ok maybe Microsoft weren't completely in the wrong, but isn't there some law against not having the option to cancel the subscription online? I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that there is.