Hey all,

I recently got word that my xbox live gold subscription was expiring. after shopping for deals on prepaid cards and finding none, i just decided to let it lapse until payday figuring even if they try to auto renew, the only card in there is an expired debit card linked to a checking account that's no longer open. The crazy part is, THE TRANSACTION CLEARED and my subscription was renewed with a new expiration date of 1/23/15 and with a new transaction in my account history for the full current price of $60 plus tax. Who paid for it? Anyone else ever have this happen?

You better double check to make sure that bank account is actually closed. And you don't owe the bank $100 in overdraft fees.

They charged a dead credit card of mine for three years. I assume they would have kept going if I hadn't canceled live myself, so yeah....it happens.

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@chop: so were you actually liable for the transaction or did it ever come out of your actual account?

@sterling: the account in question has been dead for years now. the card expired 8/12

This! I once had a bank mis-charge an overage fee, and that mis-charge caused an actual overage for which they charged another overage fee, and they didn't notify me of either for quite a while longer than one would expect.

@chop said:

This happened to me as well. I think I ended up having to pay the back charges to get my account reset, but I can't actually remember. I may have talked to support and had them take care of it for me.

@wemibelec90: the thing that bugs me is that an expired credit card should have no more access to funds. Especially if the account itself it was tied to has been closed. This should not happen.

@oldmanlight: Nah, nothing ever happened

I've read in some forums of people getting seriously fucked over for choosing to let it lapse like that. Really, it's not that hard to cancel. I don't get the big deal. Never assume nothings going to happen, even if you OP only had a expired card on it. Better safe than sorry.

@everettescott: i had intended to renew because i still play quite a bit of multiplayer on Xbox Live but i didn't want to pay full price for the 12 months. I just checked my bank and that account no longer appears and there are no pending or cleared charges for my current checking account. I have no idea how this reconciles itself. I mean when all that target mess happened in december, my wife and i cancelled our debit cards and netflix and our vet let us know right away that the transaction didn't go through and we needed to update our billing info. This is just weird.

Probably best to make sure.

I had a sorta similar thing happen to me on PSN. I actually bought a game and a day later got a call from my credit card company saying there was an early fraud warning and I agreed to let them send me a new card. So they canceled my old card. A week later my PSN account was banned and no one gave me a reason why. I had to call them and figured out that the game I bought was charged to the canceled credit card and basically the person on the phone said I bought a game and then went to my bank and disputed the charge which was not true.

Ended up buying the game with my new card and they unbanned the account at least. Still was annoying. Never had something be charged to a card that's been expired for a long time though.

....Or let it slide and say, whelp, their fault for charging an expired card :)

My brothers account seems to have completely glitched out and he has free gold. I have no idea why. There is card attached to the account, but it was never charged for gold, and ever since his account has had gold his profile has been really glitchy. Any time he starts a game, it signs him out, and he's forced to sign in again, which renders the Avatar customization stuff completely useless and can be a general annoyance. He has no interest in online games, nor do I have any desire to use his account to play them. I haven't contacted microsoft about it because I'm worried they'll ban his account, in spite of him not actually having anything to do with the problem.

And no, my brother isn't the kind of kid that would or COULD somehow hack himself free gold.

So yeah, Live seems to do weird stuff with gold sometimes. There's a chance that they could have just fucked something up, but like everyone else here, it's good to be 100% sure.