There’s an Xbox code generator floating around on Youtube and other sites right now, and a pretty popular one at that. How popular?
This popular:
Click to Enlarge
20,000+ views so far.
The program promises all sorts of Xbox freebies – 1 month of Xbox Live, 12 months if you’re feeling particularly greedy and 1600 to 4000 free Microsoft points. Of course, everything goes without a hitch in the Youtube video: we see the program boot up, the user selects his target – 1600 MS points – and hits the “Generate Code” button. After a short while, we see a “Hooray, it worked” type message and the person in the video is presented with a code.
Click to Enlarge
They then cut and paste it into the Microsoft “Redeem points code” website and are given 1600 free Microsoft points because this program is a miracle of coding.
Click to Enlarge
However.
I’m rather suspicious where programs such as these are concerned, and maybe – just maybe – somebody decided to make a fake Xbox code generator, bought a 1600 Microsoft points code legitimately and redeemed it for their “It works, honest” Youtube video on the basis that they knew they’d nab a whole bunch of people jumping through monetised hoops to claw their money back.
I know, I know. It’s a long shot, but stay with me on this one.
Once the user downloads the file, this is what greets them in the zip:
The program requires the latest version of .Net to be installed, so once the user downloads that and fires up the generator this is what they’ll see:
The program has become “severely overused”, so now you need a password to “stop the leechers”. And how do we do that?
Click to Enlarge
Well, there’s a surprise – a survey (note that the Youtube video promises “no surveys” in the title). We’ll ignore the fact that the top entry asks “Are you dumb? Find out now” and go take a look at the code while pretending we nabbed the password and continued to the next step.
Click to Enlarge
“Error, retrying. The packaged file seems to be corrupted or cannot load. Redownload the database? (This will fix the error)” There’s a link. I wonder what it does?
Click to Enlarge
Oh. Right. Another survey. Does the creator of this program expect you to fill in a survey / sign up to a ringtone service not once but twice? Absolutely.
Is it worth downloading this program, filling in some of those offers and trying it out?
Absolutely not.
Christopher Boyd
Leave a reply
