A good number of Xbox users discovered an exploit yesterday allowing them to “purchase”, or rather acquire the new Halo 4 Crimson Pack DLC without paying anything.
According to Xbox Support, the servers were experiencing hitches yesterday, allowing users to effectively “purchase” the game without being charged for it.
The game’s moderators are aware of the situation and have taken measures to inform the users that their purchase may be invalidated and disappear from their profiles automatically or have their credit cards retroactively charged for the purchase.
That’s according to this screenshot taken by a Redditor, anyway.
An earlier post made by the Xbox Support overflow account on Twitter (it’s an overflow account because the regular account is periodically “jailed” by Twitter for tweeting too often) contradicts the screenshot.
“If you can grab it, it’s yours,” reads a tweet directed to a user who asked whether it was a bannable offense to download the map pack for free.
It is our understanding that by simply downloading an item on Xbox Live, either through pre-order, purchase, or however else you manage to acquire it, the service simply applies what amounts to a flag on the item for your Xbox Live account to state that you “own” the item. Unlike Amazon’s ability to remove books from your Kindle, there’s no way for Microsoft to reverse the transaction or remove the DLC once you’ve downloaded it.
So if you don’t get charged for your “free” purchase, there’s a good chance that you never will be.