Ahahaha, as expected you keep ignoring what this post is about: limiting the communication channels to one, which is illegal. Go cite from the law if you can support your baseless argument. :)

Pfff, you are still willfully spreading misinformation and confirming my suspicion that you are either a troll or paid to spread this type of info so people just give up on their rights. Your source is ‘trust me bro’.

More being realistic about outcome here, both predicted and desired. Either way, if you’re giving MS problems, all the more power to you. I just have big doubts any real lawyers looked over or were involved in this.

This is just your personal opinion and clearly shows you are pro-corporate. What do you gain from a corporation not being punished for the crimes they commit? You clearly do not know the law; then why spread negativity? What is your gain?

Furthermore, most phone calls to these type of organisations are recorded. Which if you did intend to take them to court, you could subpoena, if not just record, the call yourself (after confirming you’re in a one party consent country, otherwise inform the operator you are recording).

1. In the legal system, written contracts, official emails, and wet-ink signed documents are accepted as ‘primary evidence.’ Telephone conversations constitute verbal statements and rely on the parties’ memories or subjective interpretations regarding ‘what was said and understood,’ courts always prioritize written documents. Poor telephone audio quality, background noise, or ambiguous statements open to multiple interpretations and can make it difficult for a judge or jury to reach a clear legal conclusion.

2. Across the US and generally in Europe, recording a telephone conversation requires the express consent of all parties involved. The support agent has the legal right not to consent to recording the call from our end, that is one. Second: Audio recordings can be edited, appended, AI-generated, or modified far more easily than written documents or signed official papers. A judge can dismiss an audio recordings under the claims it is difficult to prove the integrity of them.

3. You are willfully and completely ignoring the legal stance here: Locking the communication method to only 1 channel is illegal. Go read FTC Section 5 (15 U.S.C. § 45), ADA Title III, EAA Directive 2019/882, EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005/29/EC, GDPR 2016/679 (Articles 5, 12, and 15), and PSD2 / PSD3 (Directive (EU) 2015/2366).

Or any of the multiple lawyers you’ve supposedly hired would send it, on your behalf, to Microsoft’s legal team, which is what lawyers are paid to do.

Still personal opinion and ignorance. That record is for regulatory bodies; if you had read the post, you would see that they contacted us after regulatory intervention. Which one is better: not responding to Microsoft’s illegal response and giving regulatory bodies the ability to add to their file, ‘Hey, we didn’t write anything back to them,’ or demanding their full name and title, and requesting escalation to the legal department and informing the involved body about it? Your assumption that we didn’t send a notice via post after this correspondence is again baseless, purely your personal opinion. Come with facts instead of your silly ‘I don’t think this or that.’ The law doesn’t care about your personal opinion.

More likely, having received similar communications to this when I worked at an MSP, if it even gets to legal, it’d be closed and you’d simply get a polite request for lawyers to send any further correspondence. If there’s no letterhead it’s definitely not worth a lawyers salary to look over something that doesn’t contain a filed legal complaint or notice of intent.

Let me reflect your logic right back onto you: your claim of supposedly working at MSP is a lie, and you are being paid by Microsoft to spread misinformation. This would be my personal opinion, it is easy to spread misinformation just like you are doing here. Use your brain a bit, it’s not that hard.

If this isn’t covered in the service agreement and you’ve not stated a disability to them I would be surprised if this goes anywhere. People with difficulty hearing and speaking can use relay services, wanna guess how I know? People have been locked out of accounts before, if no recovery email is set, no secondary MFA set and you refuse to call them, you’re probably shit out of luck. If you’ve got a relative/trusted person, you could have them take the call while you communicate whatever answers to the operators question.

Again, your ‘trust me bro’ personal opinion. ToS cannot force you to state your disability, as it is blatantly clear in the screenshot attached above; we challenge them on what their alternative ownership authentication methods are. Do you see a reply from them about that, or just ignorance by them? Have you ever heard of non-delegable obligations? All Microsoft needs to do is take the government-issued ID, cross-reference it with the payment systems I integrated into their wallets, and confirm whether they match or not. Steam can do this, Epic can do this. What is so special about Microsoft that they cannot do it? ToS is not above the law; even if it directly states I must disclose my disabilities if I have any, if it is not backed by the law, it is meaningless, which circles back to the point you ignore: locking the communication method to one channel.

Stop with your bullshit know-it-all mindset; you don’t know shit. Come with legal facts if you want to defend corporate behavior and feed people the narrative, 'Hey, you shouldn’t even file a complaint.

I am just replying to this comment to inform others since I find comments like this, whether stated intentionally or not, discourage people from seeking their rights by pushing the narrative that “nothing is going to happen, they will never reply or escalate anyway.” If you have never needed to take a company to court, I hope you never do, but stating that serves two key purposes:

Asking customer support to escalate a matter to the legal department holds weight in court. This does not mean they actually will (in practice, some do and some don’t, and that is not the main point). It gives you the leverage to state in a legal complaint/in court/whatever, whether it is with the FTC or another agency, that “we informed the company, asked them to contact their legal department, and the handling officer failed to do so.” This immediately establishes that the company is acting in bad faith.

If you are already in official correspondence with any department of a corporation or government agency, they are obligated by law to forward your notice. Period. The rest is just personal opinion. It does not even matter which department you send your complaint to, if their legal channel is not publicly and easily accessible; hell, it can even be an unmonitored channel. Forwarding legal notices is a mandatory legal duty backed by law. Most companies will tell you to fill out a specific form or contact them through a designated portal and you certainly can, but you are under no legal obligation to do so.

Most people will not file a formal complaint or lack the time/financial resources to pursue a court case. Companies rely on this reality and force you to use their web forms for this exact reason: to create a labyrinth without a verifiable paper trail. Depending on the company, it might be simple to find the correct department, but let’s be realistic: how many big tech companies publish their legal department’s contact address in a way that is public and easily accessible?

If the channel is publicly available and open, it is not the user’s responsibility to find the exact internal routing for the legal department. This is precisely why we have bad-faith and transparency laws. The company and the handling officer will need to legally explain why they failed to escalate the matter to the competent department. Users cannot be unfairly burdened if the proper legal channel is not easily accessible to the public. Know your rights.

The phone call for 2FA is just an automated call that you input a number to confirm you’re the person trying to sign in.

As you did not read the post clearly, the 2FA verification code goes to the stolen phone, which has nothing to do with the post I created here. The phone number they are demanding is simply to contact me via another phone number, which they claim is the only(!) way to prove ownership. And we are asking: why exactly, and on what legal grounds? There is no answer to that at all.

The point here is that companies cannot legally limit communication methods to a single channel. There are people with speech impairments, hearing issues, or social anxiety, or maybe you just feel under the weather and don’t want to have a phone conversation. This is textbook discrimination.

Thanks! Appreciated!

Can you gdpr them?

I am not entirely sure if you meant whether I can file a compliance complaint, yes, I/you can. The thing is, I contacted them on my own first, around July 2nd I suppose. (I lost access to this account on June 27, 2026, and today is September 17, 2026. Whoever has access to my account can basically do anything they want with it, thanks to Microsoft not caring about the law. I will also give a bit more explanation as to why our response above might be seen as harsh)

Then they sent out this form, which I filled out completely, and even attached my government ID since I was also using their wallet system for some things, so they could cross-reference it with PayPal and other banking accounts I have linked there.

The response I received was: ticket closed, we couldn’t identify this as your account. I asked for the legal justification for their action, based on what legal ground/actions they initiated and they decided this wasn’t my account, and waited for a while, about 15 days or so, with no response at all. Then I contacted my lawyers, and we filed a regulatory complaint in both the US and the EU, to which they responded two weeks after those complaints were filed.

The screenshot attached here is from when our patience finally ran out. We were contacted by this dude who conceals his full name (For most people, this might seem normal, but I also come from a legal military background, and it instantly bothers me, as one asks for the full name of the handling officer, they can either give up their full name, if their policy allows it, some don’t which I can respect, then they can explain this and give you a numerical ID assigned by the company, so you can contact their supervisors to file a complaint about them, you can not just ignore this request as if it never came up) If a company or government official conceals their name and completely ignore that question, I know they are going to hide behind a corporate shield and try to talk down to you with arrogance. Unlawful actions take place the moment they do this. I wish to be proven wrong one day, but every single time a conversation opens like this, it ends up with them breaking the law. I just cannot tolerate this shit.) and demands a phone number.

We asked him what the legal justification was for claiming they can only verify information via phone, and stated that we would give them one if they could back it up with a legal basis from either US or EU laws. He completely ignored it, copy-pasted his exact same reply, and said, ‘Let’s arrange a phone call.’

We told him the same thing: a phone number will be provided if they can quote from the law stating it is mandated and that post or email is not sufficient.** He then ignored it again** and sent the exact same email. At that point, we demanded his full name, which as we expected, of course he did not give up, to avoid individual liability and he said this is Microsoft’s policy. In every single correspondence, we reminded him that he is breaking transparency laws by concealing his name and that corporate policy does not supersede the law. Of course, he ignored all of this. At that point, we issued the notice above.

After this, he still sent the very same copy-paste email, lol, two or three times more. We don’t even think this is a real person but AI, but it doesn’t really matter. This isn’t the first time I’m dealing with a big corporation pulling this kind of bullshit, but this time I got really dedicated to getting a precedent-setting decision, so I will not settle for anything. We have to take them to mediation first, for which we filled out the forms today, because it is in their terms of use and this is how they protect their public image. But I will not settle, and take it to court, seriously, fuck this shit.

+1. The least we can argue is, well, you consume food and get calories that you need to survive as you said.

What does AI solve exactly? Putting some very limited usage of it in scientific fields aside, what do we really gain by using AI?

I’m old enough to experience the “evolution” of the internet, even 20 years ago, we had issues with bots, automated emails/scams making everybody’s life unnecessarily difficult. Then came captcha, then cloudflare dominated the scene and is slowly becoming a monopoly, and surfing on the web is a hurdle in these days. Solve this, move this puzzle there so we can confirm you’re not a bot, give us your phone number (that has no legal base, just a corporate policy) so we can IDENTIFY you and that you’re not a robot. Then came 2FA causing people getting locked out of their accounts, then any mainstream company decided to get rid of their customer service agents because money and replace them with AI… The list just goes on.

Genuinely, why do we need AI in our fridges, wash machines, in everything? We just don’t. It causes more issues than it helps.

+1, I also stopped shopping from any market that forces self-checkouts. I waste more time, I scan my own stuff, and for what exactly? So the company can earn more money by kicking out their employees? Why the fuck don’t we even get a discount for “working briefly” in their market? Nothing these companies pull off ever benefits the society.

Offering the option is one thing, forcing it down your throat is another.

Man, I miss the good old days when we had some communities and places where we could meet up with people from our neighborhood or whatever. Everything in the world became so much poisonous, most individuals are brain washed and all they care about is “self”. Hell, they even commercialized meeting up with that meetup website.

I literally sat down and thought about this very same topic today: What are we supposed to do when we’re not at work or commuting? Try to form a band? Everybody wants to play a very specific “self” music. Join in a hobby class? No thanks capitalism. Volunteer? I don’t even feel like my time is appreciated there anymore, like on purpose I’m being felt into thinking “you’re doing a free labour for us!!!”

I really miss the times when we could simply meetup and talk about whatever. People had a lot more empathy, and there was a social code that would punish you if you’re being selfish and rude, now it feels the opposite.

Bandcamp hides their support email addresses inside of terms and uses policy. There isn’t a single contact method displayed on any of their index pages. If you confront them with this, they do not acknowledge it, by simply not responding to your legal question.

In my personal experience, my account was hijacked, so I tried to contact them to unlink my associated Gmail and PayPal accounts, no reply whatsoever.

If you send a legal notice to Patreon’s legal department, it returns this channel is not monitored error, and in the very same email, they claim they have no responsibility to address legal concerns sent to them through this channel.

No company or state organs are legally allowed to limit communication methods to a single method. In addition to that, if you lose access to your email address, even with the correct credentials, Patreon sends a verification code to the very same email address, to which you have no access to. Instead of deploying ownership authentication methods such as cross referencing government issued IDs with the data in their system and the payout methods you provided (In my case it was PayPal), they claim there’s no 2FA activated on your account, and they give you bullshit solutions like change your browser and stuff. All of these are illegal, directly violating consumer protection laws. Also, they hide their support personnel names and titles to avoid individual liabilities. I can keep going.

Using regulatory bodies to fine these companies is exactly what I meant in my previous comment if it was not clear. I was able to get some positive results on the way, through the FTC, CFPB, and DFPI just to name a few, and discovered many others who blatantly break the law, including government/political organs such as the European Parliament’s ASK EP unit, and the European Banking Authority, SOLVIT not reading complaints properly, etc. If there is a demand, I can make a huge list of regulatory bodies, how to contact them, how to write your complaint legally by citing the law so your complaints are actually taken seriously, and so on. These methods are all free to do and take 10 minutes to fill out per body.

I hope this doesn’t come off as rude, but my issue with comments like yours is stating, ‘Yeah, we should do something, take the regulatory way!’ but it only stays in theory. It never explains the practical steps a user can take. My direct question for you would be: What is a practical step that anyone, or at least most of us, can do as of now?

Most people are screaming into the void. There are countless complaints about PayPal freezing people’s accounts without any legal justification, and Google locking people out of their accounts due to 2FA. These are all illegal. For instance, if you are in the EU, you can file a complaint against PayPal through the Central Bank of Ireland, since that’s where they hold their license, and with enough volume, you can get their license revoked.

The FTC and consumer protection laws explicitly state that you cannot force a user to prove ownership of their account using only one method. Yet, Google does it. If you lose access to your Patreon account, they ask you weird questions like, ‘When was the last time you withdrew your Patreon funds to your PayPal?’ Who the heck takes a note of that? If you lose access to your Outlook, Microsoft sends you a form asking for the exact IP address you used to connect to your account.

These are all administrative, illegal barriers. You could be mute, you could be deaf, you are legally not obligated to buy a phone and a SIM card, or maybe you just don’t want to talk on the phone, or you have social anxiety. There are solutions out there, and I have gotten results through regulatory complaints many times. Some took a short time, some are still in progress, and I am well aware that for some, I will need to take their asses to court.

Regardless, we need unification, because as I said before, take Irish law for example: if you make a confidential complaint, and unfortunately, filing a complaint against PayPal through Irish regulatory channels falls under this category (I won’t dive into the technical details), they can literally say to your face, ‘We got your complaint, but cannot share anything further with you.’ How is a citizen supposed to know that they actually took action?

The European Parliament is blatantly breaking their own transparency laws. For example, during formal correspondences, their personnel never give out their name to avoid individual liability. I made a post about this today. You can start a petition against this directly inside the EP (This can be done online too! For free!), and take this matter to the ECJ (this one is a bit tricky, because you need a literal lawyer for this). You wrote to Amnesty, who claims to defend human rights, and didn’t get a response from them? There are government bodies investigating this shit, but the information is not easily accessible. At best, it is written in such a way that it is very easy to get confused about how to file the complaint. If government is not making it easy for us to access these info, we MUST make it easy for others depending on our knowledge, so everyone knows they have places to go and file complaints and their voices to be heard. Practical steps.

Complaining anywhere, be it on Lemmy or another social media platform, will not change anything. At least not with 200 people. People need to get their asses off the couch and start filing legal complaints, and protest if necessary; flood social media one by one against whoever is breaking the law, EVERY SINGLE GOD DAMN THEY until we get the results, so that big tech cannot even censor this shit even if they wanted to. The issue always relies on people being unhappy but not taking action, even if it means filling out a simple form.

I do understand that we are constantly pumped with, ‘Ah, nothing is gonna change even if I complain.’ The thing is, yeah, it will not if we scream into the void. We gotta complain legally by directly citing the law, which I can help with and create guidelines for, since all of these companies break very specific laws every single time. For example, Epic Games, Bandcamp support, Patreon, Ubisoft, any gamer knows about these companies, and these are all breaking transparency laws by not sharing personnel names with you, the moment you contact their support channels. They also force you to use webforms, so they can get rid of that paper trail, if you decide to file a complaint against them later, just to name a few.

If there is a demand, I wouldn’t mind sitting down all day and creating a detailed guide on which regulatory body you can go to, how to file your complaint, and how to do it. What would you suggest doing practically, for example? Any ideas are welcome, we can always iterate, and someone else can come up with something better, but we do need to start taking action at this point.

We gotta start taking these actions in volume, not just a few people.

A bit of background story on how I got involved in all of this, if you are wondering: I was living in Mannheim, Germany previously, and was kidnapped and assaulted by the Polizeirevier Neckarstadt-Mannheim police department, who literally dumped me onto the street after the kidnapping with nothing. No IDs, no glasses, no shoes, no underwear, no keys, nothing. I got my official assault report, literally stating everything I say here is correct; medical personnel called the police station, confirmed I was there, and put it on the official assault report that I was indeed dumped onto the street without my glasses or shoes.

When I was in the cell, these police officers forced me to sign a paper, which I did not, and they threatened me that they would come to my home again, which they did. I recorded where they could not show any IDs, could not state any legal grounds for why they were in my bedroom, and so on. You know what happened when I tried to take this matter to court? NOTHING. German judges did not even start the court case. These same police officers stole my phone on the first day where I recorded all of their hate crimes, which I proved with GPS logs and direct satellite recordings, but nothing has happened. These things happened on June 26 and 27, 2026. No investigation, no nothing.

I am coming from a military background, so I know my rights and I knew what to do in a stressful situation like this. But what about other immigrants? When you share these stories, people look at you like you’re an alien, or when you complain about how PayPal isn’t giving you your own money, they immediately switch to, ‘Forget about that money, you’ll never get it back,’ which honestly disappoints me, seeing how easily people can be tricked by the government.

There is so much we can do. There are many people here from so many different fields and areas of expertise; we could really ignite something that could lead to something big. Nobody needs to go through what I went through, and I bet you also went through some shitty situations where you knew you were wronged, but the system left you alone, or wasn’t there as much as it actually could be. I don’t want anyone to feel this way.

I see your point and would like to add, the issue is, some people are like bricks. Like, you could get a more logical reaction(!) from a brick than these people. You could literally paint something in front of them, and they’d still claim it’s not your own work. Like, there’s no way of proving your innocence/righteousness, no matter what evidence you put in front of them. I can not wrap my head how we can communicate with these people.

I wish you were not right, but you are. They’d even go further and say I’m an environmentalist, I’d do anything to protect the world that belongs to all of us. Fucking hypocrites.

Another reminder for the ones who don’t know, since BBC doesn’t like exposing their own government either, the UK is no different than the states. Go read how asylum seekers are treated, mocked, dehumanized in the UK. I’m talking about people who were fucking raped in their own country, escaped their homeland due to death threats, some even got fucking shot literally. What does the UK do? Trying to force these people sign papers that they wouldn’t understand, to send them back their home country.

Yeah, let’s not fucking ever forget that, primarily Trump, and the criminals under his command protecting him are fucking pedophiles. Since the exposure of their crimes, only one fucking person was judged. One. Main stream media as always is doing amazing job covering it up.

I say I will give everyone, not only the Americans, but every single citizen of earth, 100,000 dollars if I’m elected for the presidency by not joining the election.

And there will be flying bicycles, not cars, but bicycles by 2029.

Sounds so stupid, doesn’t it? You wouldn’t make this news, because I’m a regular ass citizen. Why do we keep hearing about all these stupid ass thoughts/propaganda bullshit left and right from every god damn field? This is BBC lol not your local news channels. My local news channel make better news. Hell, at least they can call something stupid, if it’s stupid.

What a joke and corrupt world we’re living in.

Do you guys remember EU Parliament came up with that stupid ass I give my consent to cookie policy yes/no policy? Most European Parliament bodies did not even implement that themselves lol if I’m not mistaken, Human rights commission website has no reject cookies button at all, and if you do not click on accept button, you can not even display the contact anchor hid behind the cookie consent banner :D

I have zero faith in any government doing anything good for their regular citizens. FTC 5 explicitly states any company or government agency MUST provide the personnel name if you’re contacting a place. Go contact Ubisoft, steam, Patreon, epic games, European banking authority, askep, Ireland bank and so on. They’re all breaking the consumer protection laws blatantly, completely disregarding transparency policies. Why the fuck would anyone follow these rules if law makers do not even follow the very same law they came up with :D

Can we get rid of all the boomers from all governments in the world already? I wanna see a world where we’re fucking “represented” by our regular ass peers?

Then they’ll claim that video of you doing the work is also generated via AI. There’s no way of convincing your regular joe once they made their mind up.

+1. I was releasing free fucking music for indie devs who didn’t have budget or limited budget for this kinda stuff, some mf on reddit who was selling his music saw this, contacted admins to claim it was made via AI, then they took the post down without doing any investigation or even contacting me. Labeled as made with AI. I’ve worked in the industry for over 10 years, there’s literally 0 reason for me to use AI to make music lol From that point onward I just pulled out all of my free libraries from public, if it’s that easy to mislabel somebody’s hard work, and only give the download codes for free for people who did contact me personally and that I was sure they were actually building something.

Wait until for them to close your account with the pretext of “your account has violated our community guidelines”, no legal justification whatsoever if some people decide to spam that report button lol stop using these bullshit platforms that see you as nothing but a number. Hell, you might be earning your life through Instagram or YouTube, and all it takes for them to delete your years of content is pressing one button.

I think it’s time to start discussing what steps we can take from this point onward. People are, including myself are tired of being treated like a fucking worm in this system and all I see is unify, let’s unify, it’s time that we unify… What are the steps we can actually take? I wrote in another topic I can teach people how to go after PayPal and other big tech hypocrites through regulatory bodies that I got positive results from. Let’s discuss what we can do destroy the public image of these two faced criminals. They can always earn more money, but you can’t buy public image with your money, remember guys.