In the last couple of days, I’ve had three or four of my friends call me and ask if I knew anybody that was looking for a Microsoft XBOX 360 and they all were selling them cheaply. Just over a week, Microsoft banned 1 million XBOX Live Players [Article: CNN] and those machines cannot rejoin the XBOX Live network, which is necessary for updates and playing games online.

This is the stuff that lawyers have wet dreams about. So a week later indeed, there were announcements of an class action lawsuit on the way [Article: Lawyers & Settlements] and at the same time, eBay, Craigslist and other sale outlets [Article: CBC News] are being flooded with these banned XBOX 360′s that look just like any other one until you login to XBOX Live and find out your cheap $100 machine will never get any updates and play online. Sure, it will play games just fine though… but it’s a crippled machine. All because people wanted to be able to pirate games for the Microsoft XBOX 360.

There’s been talk about firmware fixes for those machines that were affected [Article: Tom's Guide] but the fix is a complex set of instructions that will have you probably switching religions and getting the cops called on you because you’ve thrown your HDTV, a trashcan and your Pokémon card collection out of different windows in a fit of rage because you cannot pwn the next dude in Gears of War 2.

So yeah… don’t buy that cheap XBOX. It might be banned.