Thanks to all you CAGs forwarding my story on, as well as some people from sites like Joystiq and Kotaku contacting Microsoft about my case after I and some of you passed this blog on to them, I got a call from an Assistant Manager from Microsoft just a few minutes ago.

He explained the situation to me in detail. What had happened is that apparently my old XBOX 360, which had gotten the RROD on January 1st, 2011, ended up back in circulation somehow. I'd simply taken it to Best Buy for recycling when I bought my new Slim 360 because it was out of the 3-year warranty period.

It somehow ended up in the hands of a hacker who used it to hack some high profile gamertags of MS employees etc. I got blamed for it as the IP address was still traced to the general area where I live (wonder if a Best Buy employee took it and fixed it rather than sending it in to recycling?), and my Gamertag showed up as the one most logged-into on that console--which is no surprise...

Edit: My gamertag is dmaul1114

On October 25th, 2011 I received an automated e-mail from Xbox that was in Russian. I knew something had to be wrong, so I used Google Translate to read the e-mail. It was an e-mail confirming my account had been successfully migrated to Russia. I was also missing 1200 points that had been used to purchase “Rift” from the Russian marketplace. So while I didn’t have any FIFA related content or achievements added to my account, I knew I’d fallen victim to this recent round of account thefts that had been in the news.

I called Microsoft’s Customer Support immediately upon receiving the e-mail to report the unauthorized access, and they took down my information and started the investigation. I was informed it could take up to three weeks to get the account back. That deadline came and went, and I received an e-mail with a free 1-month Xbox Live code in late November, with a form message noting there was a delay with the investigation....