You didn’t read that headline wrong at all.  I myself pulled it off in a very shiesty way that was done by a pure and total mistake.  This was a mistake 2 years into the financial error that lead to a 5 year spree of free xbox live gold.

Initially I had my xbox live membership back in the old typical Xbox days where not all games used xbox live for much.  I mainly just played Counter Strike and Pandora Tomorrow to play online.  Halo was another chapter of online play at the time that I went way overboard, until Microsoft piggy backed off of Bungie’s design of the online social scheme.

After waiting 12 hours in line for the Xbox 360, I immediately hooked it up and started a new account for Live while deleting my old account.  At the time I was too young for my own credit card so I had to use my mom’s credit card.  The card was due to expire within a year of when I started up my account.  At the same time I set the account to automatically renew every year.  That’s where the fun began.  Roughly two years after that, I knew my account had to expire at some point.  By this time I had my own credit card and all my friends’ accounts were expiring.  I took a look into the billing information and found out that my mom’s credit card was still on there.  By this time, it’s the year 2007, one year after the expiration of the credit card.

I decided to leave it alone until microsoft decided to close the account and force me to put a new card on.  Another year goes by, it’s now 2008.  I check my email and I Saw my first ever email from microsoft telling me that my account was setting itself up for an automatic renewal.  The next day I got another email telling me that the card on the account had expired and that I needed to update my billing information.  I promptly ignored the email further waiting for my account to force me to update.  I searched my email account and saw that this had been going on for some time now repetitively for a few years.  As it turned out, I was free riding on a billing glitch from microsoft.

Boy did it felt great to not give Microsoft a dime for their online services. I was living the dream, until now.  My 5 year reign of free xbox live terminated due to an upgrade from Microsoft.  Now my account is in limbo of the typical free account which effing sucks.  But you know what grinds my gears more than that my spree had ended?  You have to pay Microsoft just to be able to use Netflix on your xbox.  Now that’s just bullshit.