Azure Subscription Disabled - My Journey (please help)

Question

I was using my Azure Pay-As-You-Go subscription and my VM's were randomly stopped without any good reason why. I noticed on the subscriptions page that my subscription was disabled and I received this message on my subscription's page:

"We've identified suspicious activity in this subscription. To protect your account, we've disabled the subscription. Please contact Azure Support to resolve the issue."

So I did exactly that, I created a support ticket, stated that I wish for my subscription to be re-enabled and waited. Whilst creating the support ticket it gave me some recommendations as found in the "Solutions" tab when I make a support request. The main resource that was helpful honestly wasn't helpful at all. My credit isn't expired, my spending limit isn't reached (it's unlimited) as this is a Pay-As-You-Go subscription. My bill isn't due as I haven't been given my first invoice yet as I just recently started using Azure, my credit card spending limit isn't a factor as I haven't been charged quite yet. My subscription wasn't accidentally disabled either as I couldn't reactivate it as the "Reactivate" button was greyed out.

A few minutes later I received an email saying this:

Hello,
Thank you for reaching out. Unfortunately, we could not verify your account information. Our earlier decision remains and your account will stay closed. Please understand that we keep security checks like these in place in order to protect the quality and integrity of the Azure service.
Thank you,
Azure Support

This makes absolute no sense for so I emailed them back, realising I got no reply and that I won't get any reply because the support ticket was closed when I received the message. Just for fun I did lie about what I use Azure for but I'll get onto that later. Anyways, I sent a second support ticket to Azure and played with it a little bit to make it seem like I was hacked and I scared the hacker away and just wanted my account back. I got this message from them lol:

Hello,
Thank you for reaching out. Unfortunately, we could not verify your account information. Our earlier decision remains and your account will stay closed. Please understand that we keep security checks like these in place in order to protect the quality and integrity of the Azure service.
Thank you,
Azure Support

Well....this is helpful. So I sent a third support ticket for fun (I was pretty annoyed ngl). So I made the title: Carrying on from my previous case and just asked them what the hell that silly message means. I thought that this is just silly and there must be another way to contact them, then I found their Twitter profile and asked them if I provided my subscription details they'll be able to re-enable my subscription or at least figure out what caused my subscription to be disabled. Luckily, they didn't say that message I mentioned earlier. Instead, they said that it could only be assisted by the support team I was using. So I had almost lost hope at this point. They also mentioned to respond to the email support I received (which to clarify does nothing as the cases were automatically closed).

My understanding is that I was just being support by bots. The Twitter profile said that they were actually technicians, (that are people) but I disagreed. Speaking of lying as I said a couple paragraphs ago, I did think that mining cryptocurrency on the virtual machines could be the cause and I received an email earlier on that I "violated the Microsoft Acceptable Use Policy." I did scavenge this and found nothing about cryptomining. I did find forums on the internet with similar issues but this isn't the first time I'm stopped for doing something for "violating T&C, Privacy Policy, etc" when there is literally nothing in these to back up what I broke/how I broke them.

So I had little hope at this point, but had a fun idea. So I made a support request saying:
Prove You're Not A Bot By Replying With A Message That ""IS NOT"" (insert that annoying message from Azure support here)

.....I received the exact same message, the support case was closed and it just brought me to here. By the way, I did notice that there were several Azure Support options to purchase, but since my subscription was disabled, my whole account was "disabled" (I could only write support tickets and read just about everything, but I don't have access to resources like connecting to my virtual machine), meaning I couldn't upgrade my support options even if I wanted to (for just this issue I'm not going to pay for something small and annoying)

Conclusion:
This is honestly hilarious how terrible Azure support and Microsoft support is. I told Twitter than I ran this social experiment and proved their theory wrong that technicians respond to the emails. Not one word was changed for all 5 silly unnecessary support requests I made.

I apologise for all the information I bombard you with, but this is ridiculous in the fact of MS Azure's support quality and it's ridiculously hilarious that I basically proved that this is most likely run by bots.

Answer 1

To all facing the same/similar issue/s:

I'm really sorry that you've come across this issue that I have also come across, I am able to empathise.

First, attempt to make a support ticket via the Azure portal, fingers crossed it all goes well but if it doesn't take this route:

If you haven't paid for support on Azure Portal AND/OR keep getting prepared answers that don't give much information, I highly suggest creating your own question/forum on this website and finding a Microsoft employee to help you. They may give you a certain email address to contact you directly with them via email. They may also ask for a email with specific text in the subject field. My tips are to ask if they are able to review your subscription and/or attempted support ticket made on the Azure portal.

If that doesn't work you could try to extend your support to Twitter via DM's: @AzureSupport or directly go to: https://twitter.com/AzureSupport (also ask if you can provide your subscription id and/or attempted support ticket to review)

If you don't have access to Twitter or if that doesn't turn out well, best bet is likely using Reddit. The Employees on the https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/ page are very friendly and helpful. I've gotten the most information out of them and they are as honest as they are capable of being it. Making a post on the subreddit could work, but it's likely easier and more efficient to directly contact a employee via here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/about/moderators/
I spoke to DreyMS and they were really helpful, that's just my personal preference as I had an efficient conversation with them, any other employee is also fine. Make sure you ask if the employee can look into your case by providing your subscription ID and/or support case ID.

Good luck!.......or is it just me?!

Answer 2

Thank you for reaching out! I can assure you that we aren't bots and I completely understand how frustrating it is to get a preapproved response that doesn't really answer your question. Responses like that may be needed depending on how and where you ask certain questions but I'll do my best to answer your question here.

I did think that mining cryptocurrency on the virtual machines could be the cause and I received an email earlier on that I "violated the Microsoft Acceptable Use Policy."

Updated

Can cryptocurrency be mined on Azure?
Cryptocurrency mining is prohibited in most of the current offerings, including the Azure Free Account and the Azure for Students account. You can check out terms of each offer here:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-details/

"You will not facilitate, engage in, or participate in any use of Azure services, for crypto-currency mining, denial of service attacks, spamming, or illegal activity, and/or any use that could cause harm to Microsoft or others, and will enforce strong internal controls to prevent the same."

In addition to the current offer terms, you'll need to make sure that local laws do not prohibit mining.

What about Pay-as-you-go?
You'll want to check the current offer details but Pay-as-you-go does not currently have terms that prohibit cryptocurrency mining. The bigger question here is why would someone would want to mine in the cloud instead of mining using specialized cryptocurrency hardware?

Most of the blog posts that come up with a quick search on mining cryptocurrency will advise you not to mine in the cloud as the costs tend to outweigh your earnings (sometimes somewhat significantly). This appears to be due to the shift from CPU to GPU and then from GPU to specialized hardware like ASICs for mining.

As the person paying the bill you would need to be aware of the activity on your account (running a script may be easy but make sure you know what that script is doing) and be able to pay for services (even if you lose money mining). This tends to be the reason why many people opt for other mining options but if you are a researcher looking to run some experiments in the cloud, I would check the current offer details for Pay-as-you-go to see if mining is currently mentioned.

Additional Reading:

• Offer Details
• Azure Legal Information
• Acceptable Use Policy (you'll need to scroll down a bit)

Answer 3

I have the exact same problem now. I created a subscription and just created a VM and now my subscription is disabled. I opened 3 separate tickets but got the exact same BOT reply.

Answer 4

Why you disabled my subscription, Please re renabled my subscription i really need this so much please.