None of those people live in this town, so it's safe. It's ghetto Tulsa and OKC where you don't want to live, but does that really need to be said?

Actually this is totally the wrong tack.

What is the gamertag and does your brother use a password like "password."

Ever since the Amazon thieves stopped selling on ebay I have been itching for some black market XBLA titles.

I assume you passed on the gamertag and that the perp has been logged on the past few hours?

I did mention his and my GT in the original email. It's been online all day (7 hours and counting). Stepto did respond to me via Twitter and I've passed the info on to my brother.

I've also tattled on him to mom so she can light a fire under his ass

The other thing is that maybe your brother is looking for the insurance company to replace everything, so he's not that worried about getting his Xbox back.
But of course if the photos/data stolen mean something to him this is the best way to get them back.

Ok, so he's going by the station after work. He's also got 3 police friends at work, including a Captain (not really sure how that works at a music college, but whatever). He's got everything he needs from me and plenty of support around him to help out.

I can't wait to hear what's next. Thanks for all the advice, everyone. I'll be sure to let you know how it turns out.

Is he playing SmackDown vs RAW 2008?

I can neither confirm nor deny.

I still don't understand how you can be dumb enough, first to login in Xbox Live and then with another user's account. I know, he wants to try Gold and stuff, but that's the easiest way to get caught.

He could be using Tor or something like that but I really doubt it.

Tor?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28...ity_network%29

Certainly possible. Reading through that, it is possible to find origination. While I doubt this person is clever enough to mask their location, I'm just happy to give my brother a chance to recover his possessions. Whether the cops do anything is another matter entirely.

Question, My Xbox Live membership expires in June and will be automatically renewed for $49.99. Although I don't mind paying it, I would love to know if there are any deals right now to get it cheaper?

Newegg: $34.99 + 1-2% back with Bing.

btw, never pay $50 for Live.

Exactly. Deals on it come up all of the time. I don't think I've ever paid more than $30 per year, and generally like to stay at least a year 'pre-paid' just in case they raise the rates.

You Rock! Thx Dude! I knew I could get some assistance here.

No sweat.

I hope I don't jinx myself by buying today's TeeFury shirt:

WTF!? My 360's DVD-drive seems to have committed suicide. It isn't recognizing discs at all. I don't even get the "Please insert an XBox-360 disc" message. I put a disc in, close the tray, and it just sits there with an "Open tray?" prompt like I closed the tray with nothing in it.

Do I need this mere days before Red Dead and Alan Wake hit!? DO I, MICROSOFT!?

Sorry to hear about that. And yes, very bad timing considering upcoming releases.

So in my ongoing quest to free up HD space (I install all disc-based games I'm currently playing, and I'm hesitant to uninstall them if I think I might play again, so it stays pretty full), I decided to move some stuff over to my fancy new 16GB USB stick. I moved my profile, themes, gamer pics, and ALL arcade games and associated saves. I'm working on Mass Effect now and inexplicably kept my saves for it on the stick as well. It had been working just fine on my Xbox at home.

On Saturday I took the USB stick to a friend's to play some games there. I had done this plenty of times with the standard pre-USB official memory unit. Everything seemed fine at first - the profile and theme loaded as usual, game history displayed correctly, etc.

I then tried to open Game Room and got an "unable to open" message. I went into the Memory settings and saw that a lot of the games/data on the USB stick had the yellow "uh oh" exclamation point icon next to them.

Right after that, my profile signed out on its own. I restarted the Xbox and the profile was nowhere to be found. I went into memory settings and, despite the fact that the memory stick still only had 6.6 GB of free space on it as before, indicating the presence of the same data, all categories in the list (Games, Avatar Items, etc.) said "0 items."

I was hoping this was some funky problem with my friend's Xbox. When I came home, however, the same thing happened on my machine. So I got to learn about the process of recovering a gamertag and re-downloading a bunch of stuff, including all arcade games.

There's nothing like that sinking feeling when you realize all your game saves are gone. I could deal with the loss of the arcade game saves, even though they collectively represent hours of time. But the Mass Effect file - 65 hours in, level 58 and a half character (max is level 60 for those who haven't played it), second playthrough on Hardcore mode 3/4 of the way complete - stings a bit. Not to mention the 2 other characters I had created and played through more than halfway.

Lesson learned: no more USB memory stick usage on Xbox for me. And back up important saves to a secondary location.

Wow! That sucks.

What brand/model is your USB stick?

I've been using the one that was on sale in Amazon between my bedroom and home theater Xbox without issue. I have my profile there and a game save (Saboteur) and that's it.

It was the HP v125w 16 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive. Just got it about a month ago from Amazon, but don't remember if it was on sale.

Also, farewell Hexic. It was nice while it lasted.

I have my saves in 2-3 different places so I can live with that part. Losing my gamer profile though would really suck since many arcade games save there. I have my profile on a USB stick and now I'm thinking seriously about putting it back on a standard memory card. Sucks your USB stick died like that.

In-Profile game save data is recovered from the XBL servers with the gamertag as long as you were connected to live when you saved them. Trust me, my time with Texas Hold'Em knows what it's talking about

Hmm...so maybe I haven't lost the saves for some (or all) of my arcade games? That would be a good thing. The only one I've checked is Game Room and everything seemed to be there.