Forum Discussion
Office 365 subscription disabled for fraud- Help?
I am a registered Microsoft partner migrating a client to Office 365. We started a working trial on on 1/5/18 and migrated most users in the first five days from on-premise Exchange.
Problems started on 1/19/18. The Office 365 30-day trial was disabled by Microsoft on day 14. Some automated Microsoft check flagged the account as 'fraud'. The client has been in business for 20+ years in agriculture and does not engage in any type of behavior that could remotely be construed as fraud. No mass emails, no malware, etc.
Four hours of waiting and frustrating phone support was needed to re-activate the trial. During these 4 hours, all 40+ employees were without access to email, word, excel, etc. The case was escalated many levels at MS and I was promised that the back-end team would investigate the cause of the mistaken deactivation of the account.
After lengthy discussion, the end result on Friday was MS agreed to extend the trail for year to compensate the client for the downtime. MS sent an email to me that apologized and stated the free trial would be extended for one year as compensation for their mistake. MS assured us that the account would not be disabled. All was good - client was happy and we chalked it up to a system glitch.
Fast forward two business days later. Today (Tuesday), at 9:30am this morning my phone started ringing that users had no access to email, word, excel, etc, again and that Microsoft had once again disabled their subscription. Same exact problem from Friday that I was told would not happen again - the account was disabled for fraud. No one could be more specific as to the actual reason, just that it was flagged. I was not given any information about the results of Friday's investigation.
After three hours on the phone this morning, I was told by a manager in the commercial billing team that since they had already manually re-activated the trial once, they would be unable to re-activate it again today or tomorrow and that an investigation was underway since Friday. Our only option to restore service would be to convert the trial to a paid subscription. I called the CTO of the company and explained that even though Microsoft had extended the free trial for a year, three days later, that trial was effectively ended. The client would have to pay if they wanted access to email, and office applications. I also mentioned (again) that Microsoft's automated fraud detection system which had flagged the account and disabled it on Friday and again on Tuesday, would not flag it again.
The angry client had no options - MS had them over a barrell: pay or no email. They converted the trial to a subscription and paid to license all mailboxes - even mailboxes that we are converting to shared accounts because we were in the middle of a migration and they couldn't afford to lose another day of service.
The commerical billing manager told me that he couldn't make any promises for any credit due.
My client is expecting that their account willl be disabled for fraud at any time, and is irate that their mail services were held hostage until they paid. We were not even 14 days into the 30 trial when this mess began.
Two full working days of my time has been consumed on sorting this mess out. O365 phone support is abysmal for anything like this and I was told that I coudn't escalate the case any further. The client is not engaged in any fraudulent activity, they don't have infected machines, etc, etc. However, even if there was fraud, does it make sense to shut down all the users without contacting the admin or partner of record and not be able to restore their service immediately when the person calls in to complain? To have 40+ employees sitting around for 2+ days twiddling their thumbs?
I'm looking for help to restore my client's trust in MS. Is there anyone at Microsoft that I can speak to that will resolve this issue in three ways:
1) Provide the reason for deactivation of the subscription.
2) Provide writeen assurance that the subscription will not be deactivated without contacting us first..
3) Provide a service credit.
Clearly this isn't a routine "complaint", is there a someone at Microsoft that can act as a liason in helping resolve this issue? I've tried the partner team (worthless) and the online services team. The online services team has been helpful but their hands are tied.
Office365 is touted as having a 99.9% uptime guarantee. We've already had 9 hours of downtime for this client in 3 business days.
--
Chuck
19 Replies
- Petr_BlahaCopper Contributor
Hello Chuck Marangola
one of our partner organisations has exactly the same problem.
Please, how did you sovle it? Because MS support doesn't do anything?
Thank you!
PB
- David BenicCopper Contributor
It happened to me a week into the free trial. The same long mess, downtime, wasted hours and days. Still no service back. It took me years to move to the cloud. Now that I did I wonder if MS office was the best choice.
While I'm sure this could be handled in a more chic fashion, there are lots of (spam) parties firing up trial tenants for spam runs etc. Now, trials can be converted to paid subscriptions, and extended one time - trial periods are not infinite. A trial tenant in principle temporary and meant for demonstration or dev/test purposes while it is in trial. Since you were using it more in a production kind of way (and perhaps one of your users sent a bulk mailing?), something triggered a mod to use their ban hammer. I'm sure you can escalate through the proper channels; you have an e-mail from MS with a statement contradiction their closure action.
Well, this is pretty messed up. There are no restrictions in terms of actual user accounts you can provision with trials, most likely it's something to do with CC verification or similar. Still, doenst seem like the issue has been handled in any acceptable fashion on MS side. Let me see if I can find someone to take a proper look into it...
- Craig ArnoldtIron Contributor30 day trials are limited to 25 users, I believe. Perhaps running 40 accounts breaks the trial rules?
- Chuck MarangolaCopper Contributor
It's possible, but I think unlikely. When we started the trial, we asked Microsoft to increase the number of trial licenses to 50 and they did that on 1/5 and we were running like that for two weeks. They will frequently add extra licenses to a trial (or extend free trials) if requested.
- Well, while I completely agree this never have happened: might I ask why you and your customer decide to make a real migration on a non-production tenant? Non-production tenants are intended for testing, not for real production use....by the way, since it's not possible to go back in time and revert the situation, I hope someone from Microsoft will see also your message so you can get the support you are requiring now