Is this scam? Complete a purchase by May 11, 2025 to keep your account active (SOLVED)

Some of us have done 'a little research' and have never knowingly had an Azure account. I don't have an organization, work, or school account (I retired in 2010, the same year Azure became publicly available), and have never had one, nor have I knowingly signed up to a business service, so it's still a mystery why I received the email. It's only natural to worry that one's account may have been compromised...

When I was unable to access the Azure portal, I went onto the Azure support platform to ask about this email and was unable to access it without logging in to the Azure platform. Microsoft Learn support & moderators were unable to explain why it was sent to me and so many others who knew nothing about Azure, Entra, or tenant IDs.

I found a blog article, 'Microsoft Phising with MS-365 Tenants', by Günter Born, a Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Answers community moderator, in which he investigates this email and cannot reach a conclusion, suggesting "Microsoft had either been hacked – or that they've totally lost control of their cloud stuff."

You may consider these forum responses "pretty funny", but, given the circumstances, I think many of us were justified in having concerns that our accounts might have been compromised.

I got this email as well.

The best clue is that it is because of signing up to Teams during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I think I had two sign-ins one personal and one for Open Source contributions (both free accounts of course).

I signed into teams and it gave me some sort of option about what I wanted to use - unfortunately I didn't read it, so don't know what it said. Probably it gave me the option as to which account to use. Anyway, I logged in with my personal one and while this login is progressing, the address bar briefly shows "?tenantid=xxyy etc". This is not actually the one in the email. There doesn't seem to be a way to display the tenantid once logged in (the method in the Microsoft help 'click on three dots and select Copy Link to Channel' doesn't work).

Then I tried logging into Microsoft Azure. This time I used my OS username. This logged into an Azure account, and on looking at directories and subscriptions, it says my current directory is a friend who has added me to a COVID-19 Teams. Below that is the Directory Name for my OS user, with an option to switch, AND THIS HAS THE DIRECTORY ID from the email.

But if I try to switch to the directory from the email, it says Error Code: AADSTS5000225 this tenant has been blocked due to inactivity.

BUT THIS HAS BEEN BLOCKED WHEN THE EMAIL SAYS I HAVE TILL AUGUST 8, 2025 TO KEEP THE ACCOUNT ACTIVE.

I think it is not a scam, it is just Microsoft trying to tidy up a few thousand dead Entra accounts. I wanted to work out whether it referred to my current active business O365 account or something else. Logged in with an admin account, I could look up the id of my current account in the Microsoft 365 Entra online tools, and it did not match the one in the email.

So I wanted to understand the account that would be deleted. I could not find a utility in the MS online system that allowed me to enter the id from the email, and discover anything about the account details. I found a utility at www.get-tenant.info that takes an id and returns info about it, including the whatever.onmicosoft.com domain name. I recognised this as an error I had made 10 years ago when setting it up, and I had abandoned the account and started again. I would have deleted the erroneous account at the time but I could not see how to do so.

Maybe the utility I found will enable others to work out what the id in the message refers to.

M$ Gorilla Sales Tactics, absolute bastards, stop pulling these stunts and go fix all the damage you have caused to W11... NOW!