My friend got hacked and of course microsoft will not even try to help

I don’t know I’m not buying this whole thing.

My company is a Microsoft partner, we deal with all types of issues and requests including account hacking and lockouts. This just doesn’t read like a Microsoft customer support email. It reads more like a scammer actually.

The first paragraph sounds strange and not how they would typically start an investigation response.

They can, and have, recovered full access to our customers’ data in such an event, so weird to say they can’t.

even our engineers cannot retrieve them.

That just reads very strange. They don’t talk like that.

Then the final line with “Sincerely,” improperly indented looks like classic scammer text alignment.

And they wouldn’t sign it as “Microsoft Customer Support”. It would be signed with the agents name and wouldn’t be finite. Their ticketing system places footers that instruct the user to reply to the email for continued support.

This message looks bogus to me.

They 100% can verify a linked Minecraft account and transfer it, or provide a new key.

They just won’t.

I also bet if the US intelligence agencies ask those engineers suddenly have ways to help. Microsoft holds the keys.

Story time: I once saw a betting page claiming to give away free Dota 2 skins. I wanted to take a chance, but smelled the sketchyness, so I logged in with a secondary account that I used that only had a free NSFW game.

Unexpectedly, after I logged in, they inmediately changed the password and the email associated, and probably tried to steal any skin I had; since this secondary account had none, I didn't lose anything.

I contacted Steam support, told them what happened with proof that I'm the owner of the previous email. They verified the situation, and I had my account back less than 48 hours after being "scammed". All of this in an account that literally only had a free porn game.

The massive difference between and what your friend is dealing with Microshit is crazy.

This is absolutely, 100% a fake or scam email. This email did not come from Microsoft.

Microsoft is rather inept as a company and always has been, so this action sincerely doesn't surprise me.

Quit buying MicroIndiaSoft products.

I call bullshit. I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but this seems fake to me.

Edit: I initially assumed OP created the fake email deliberately for ragebait. But most other people are assuming OP thinks (or thought) this email was real, meaning it's a scam email and OP's friend might be actively falling for the scam. I now agree with this interpretation. Sorry my initial comments were a bit rude.

I have two outlook accounts.

One is old and constantly deals with theft attempts.

But they never work because I have a passkey guarding the account.

MS doesn't let you completely disable password login. So the thiefs keep trying. Unfortunately for me. That means every time I want to access the account MS wants me to reset my, clearly working, password.

Not because they guessed my password, but because they tried to giess my password. You know a completely normal occurrence.

So, to summarize: "someone broke our security and so we're forbidding YOU access to YOUR data."

Sounds about capitalist.

Slightly off topic, but is there still no viable Minecraft fork?

They are protecting your personal date by not allowing the only person who should be able to access it?

encrypted onedrive? what? press X to doubt. how do they do image recognition on uploaded images, then?

They tell you to just pay again because most people will. Most people will just roll over and put up with their shit.

Not that I care about Minecraft, but it's been out like 15 years and it hasn't come down in price. What are they still paying for with its sales? It's straight profit at this point. They could comp the guy a key and they would lose absolutely nothing and only gain goodwill, but they know people are hooked on it and will just pay again. Or at least enough people will just pay again to cover the few who won't.

If your x86-64 machine still runs well, dump Windows and put Linux on it. If it's starting to show its age, consider the Mac mini. $500 gets you a lot of power. If you do buy another machine capable of running Windows, don't buy a pre-built one that comes with a Windows license. Either build, or find a seller that doesn't include the OS or doesn't include a Windows license. Hell, even consider a used business workstation. They'll take the volume license for Windows off of it (it probably wasn't capable of running Windows 11) and you can put Linux on that. If you're intimidated by Linux, Mac is super easy, but the truth is... so is Linux. Start with Ubuntu, it's dead simple, and if you really like the way Windows looks and feels, start with something running KDE. I recommend Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE instead of GNOME) but Linux Mint is pretty popular too, and that uses KDE by default. And KDE is more than "the Windows-like frontend." It's actually a lot nicer than that.

At least he got a response. A while ago I clicked on a bad link when drunk and lost control of my Facebook account. Zero response from meta. Wankers. It's unfortunate, I'd like to delete the account as there are some unfortunate photos of me on there from way back. I guess I will forever be visible wearing my ex's lacy underwear and gripping a can of strong cider. Ho hum.

I'm in my 40's and have always been a tech nerd. I have no personal information or pictures I don't want to get out saved in the cloud. All of my things are only locally saved and backed up. I also keep multiple emails with different passwords and names. My Microsoft account I do have is verified for changes through a non Microsoft email address.

It would be a pain in the ass to screw with me in any major capacity. Quite frankly, I'm still surprised that the masses just accept cloud saving all their pictures and documents, just trusting Amazon or Google or Apple or Microsoft to not have security issues, especially when they've had so many security issues.

That kind of corpo language... Lol. People stick with a operating system from an organisation that talks like that... I guess they love it.

I don't know what you're expecting. My most secure account is practically impossible to recover without the credentials, passkey, & one-time password generator or recovery code. Cracking the encryption keys isn't feasible & the account providers lack the higher-level keys to decrypt them. This is all by design.

Lack of recovery means they either did security protocols right (they can't circumvent them either) or at least pretend to. Recovery that circumvents keys indicates weaker security protocols or different priorities.

A gaming service isn't really protecting your most sensitive data like an account that accesses OneDrive may. The risks & business value differ.