A few months before I left Ireland to move
to the USA I purchased an Xbox360 and setup an Xbox360 Live account, part
of the process was filling in my credit card details and billing address
which included Ireland as the country. Before I moved to the USA I sold
my Xbox360 and games and then purchased a brand new one over here so I
wouldn’t have any region and NTSC/PAL issues.

Fast forward on a year and the account
has expired and the Irish credit card that was used to setup the account
no longer exists so I receive an email letting me know that I need to provide
new credit card details but what should be an easy matter of filling out
a few fields on a form and updating my address details hits a brick wall.
 The COUNTRY field is not editable, it’s fixed to Ireland, this means
that the credit card verification fails so I can’t renew my account.

Ok, maybe it’s time to call xbox support.
They answer, I give my details and tell them the issue and their answer
is that I cannot change the country. I tell them that people move countries
all the time, they must have some method of updating account information,
they tell me that they have no way of changing the country,

Apparently once the xBox360 Live account
is setup the country you select is permanent.  Their solution to the
problem is to delete the account and have it setup again and this sounds
like a reasonable solution until you ask about all the items that you have
purchased on Xbox Live that are linked to your account.

Their answer is not a good one, Once
the account is deleted you will lose all the items your have purchased
and they cannot be transferred to the new account but you will be able
to repurchase them on the new account.  Ok, what about a refund…
nope their system cannot provide refunds.

This is ridiculous, who designs a system
that makes it impossible to change the country field in a users account
details? People do move countries and not just to the USA but all around
the world.

What makes this a really laughable situation
is that I want to give Microsoft money for something and they are refusing
it, without the update to the country in my account I cannot use the Microsoft
Live marketplace to purchase new games on the Xbox Live Arcade, I cannot
access the Xbox Live video marketplace to purchase and download movies
and I can’t play any of my xbox Live games online without my subscription
account.

So if you have an Xbox Live account
then make sure you cancel any plans you may have in relation to moving
countries.