Gamasutra has the details on a class action lawsuit against Microsoft over its shady XBOX Live subscription billing practices,
Graves explains that in his own particular case, he let his Xbox Live subscription expire by declining to update his credit card information; when he renewed his account several months later with a new credit card, Microsoft charged him for both a new subscription and the subscription that had previously expired.
According to the court filing, Microsoft told Graves that the issue was “not a mistake,” and said he would receive two years of Xbox Live service, as the charges covered both his manual service renewal, and his pending automatic renewal from the previous subscription.
Microsoft did something like this to me last year, though not quite as bad as this guy. My XBOX Live membership was set to expire in a month. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t want them to bill my credit card, so I bought an XBOX Live subscription card, entered the code and extended my membership. And a month later, despite the fact that my subscription had 6 months to go before expriing, they billed my credit card for the renewal, and just added the time to the length of my subscription.
Stupid f—s. I canceled the card I had on file with them (there’s no way to remove all credit cards, as far as I could tell) and refuse to ever again give them anything but a temporary credit card number.