How can I contact Microsoft Rewards support over the phone?

It's really difficult to talk to a human at microsoft, they will just direct you to the blackhole you can throw tickets into.

Filing a complaint with a regulatory or oversight body like the better business bureau will make it so you will likely get a response (not necessarily a good one)

I sent in a new ticket. My latest one just references the one that is unanswered and closed the new one as a result. It's been weeks... there's zero reason for them to be unresponsive aside from "we see you have a ticket so we're closing your new one." There's a REASON why I keep having to send new ones. Will report back when this new one gets a response... I've resorted to begging and pleading with whoever reads the ticket to actually read the text and try to help instead of following the same "we know you aren't getting responses but I'm not going to either since nobody closed your first ticket, good luck LOL!"

I've raised around 240 tickets about this since October when it first affected me. I could raise 240 more and I am confident nobody will do anything. The impression I get is that for whatever reason, Microsoft has given the rewards support department the green light to torch their goodwill with the public and send people packing to other browsers and search engines.

I could not have said this better. I’m glad I contacted this support page. I felt alone. It doesn’t make it better because so many people are going through the same thing, I just don’t feel alone anymore.

I have become numb to the opening sentence from support time after time about taking concerns like this seriously. Quite frankly, it is insulting.

UPDATE: Good news and bad news. Good news, I'm able to redeem points for gift cards again. Bad news, support didn't do anything, and I have no idea what resolved the issue.

I tried redeeming points for a gift card again, and this time I got a different error - not the one about the account being locked. I opened a new ticket and waited for a response. I didn't receive a response, but I tried again a few days later. This time the system asked me to provide a phone number to verify the account. After setting up the account with a phone number, I was able to redeem points for the gift card.

What actually fixed the issue? I have no idea. The best suggestion I have is to add a phone number to your account if you don't already have one, but this is no guarantee.

Good luck everyone.

This happened for me at the start of December before then being reversed and having it all taken away again. If you are temporarily able to redeem points you might want to consider totally cashing everything out right now before it is too late.