I tried to buy some points the other night, in order to buy Braid and probably Castle Crashers, and the system barfed. We can't authorise your card, or some such. Bla bla. Peter B was over at the time, and guffawed with sympathetic indignance: he's experienced much the same, and said, oh just google Xbox Points Problems and you'll see you're not alone.
I just got off the phone with my credit card company, and it went something like this:
"Oh yes, we're sorry your card got frozen, but you tried to make a purchase from Microsoft, and it got flagged as a potentially criminal activity."
No wai.
"Oh yes, Microsoft's Xbox division pings the card from Luxembourg, and you're not in Luxembourg, and they also do this thing where they charge your card a dummy £1 transaction to test to see if the card works. This is what criminals do, so as it's from a .lu domain, it's done on the internet, and they do this dummy charge, it automatically shuts the card down."
Brilliant. So I had the XBox Live system complaining that my card didn't go through ... and it's because their transaction shut it down. Genius. I have tears of laughter!
On top of that, the email I get when I successfully purchase points always gets flagged as SPAM by my mailserver.
(Get Geometry Wars 2 if you've not done so already; it's amazing, and has the best social scoreboards...)
Posted by: Tom Armitage | September 04, 2008 at 12:36
Lots of people do that $1 charge thing.
Posted by: Justin | September 04, 2008 at 12:38
Yup, I had a similar problem when I ordered an iPhone on CarPhoneWarehouse.com. The order never went through, but I only found out when, after waiting a while, I called CPW who said there was a problem with the card. So I called the bank who gave me much the same reason as you had regarding Microsoft. I cancelled the order in the end.
Posted by: Phil Gyford | September 04, 2008 at 12:46
i just bought a bunch from newitts.com, appears to be the cheapest at the mo (though you have to wait for delivery, and obviously the physical packaging is totally unnecessary).
£28 for 4200, 50p postage.
http://www.newitts.com/product/IT029751/XBox_Live_Points_Cards.htm
Posted by: md | September 04, 2008 at 13:35
The real tragedy of this story is you still haven't got to play Braid!
*shakes fist in general direction of redmond*
Posted by: adam | September 04, 2008 at 14:21
ditto to Adam's comments on Braid and Tom's about GW2. Both brilliant.
What a collosal f***up. Tell this to the "digital distribution will kill retail" pundits
I think there's a market for someone to build consoles for affluent globe-trotting gamers like yourself! :-)
BTW, you can buy retail point cards, which suxors, but will get you around the problem. err.. if they have them in UK yet.
Posted by: Kim | September 04, 2008 at 18:57