Several posts have popped up online over the past 24 hours from Xbox owners claiming that they’ve received emails from Microsoft telling them that “it may be time to trade in your console to Best Buy,” which reportedly offers them a chance to get “up to $375 back” on Xbox Series X consoles and “up to $200 back” on Xbox Series S consoles.
While the PR optics on something like this might lead you to believe this is too stupid to possibly be true, the original post detailing the email from user Nintendeal on X has since been corroborated by multiple users on both X and ResetEra.
The reported email opens by asking Xbox owners, “Haven’t played on your console in a while?” and states that if they’ve “moved on to XBOX on PC or another way to play XBOX games,” that it “may be time to trade in” their consoles at Best Buy.
Many have understandably assumed, partially due to the email address featured in the images, that these screenshots are fake. However, there are a few reasons I personally believe otherwise.
don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before…
XBOX sent me an email encouraging me to sell my console because I haven’t used it in awhile
“Haven’t played on your console in a while? If you’ve moved on to XBOX on PC or another way to play XBOX games, it may be time to… pic.twitter.com/Ejvs2FEjIa
— Nintendeal (@Nintendeal) October 19, 2026
For a start, while the “@e.xbox.com” address might look odd, it is an official Xbox subdomain. A Microsoft employee even confirmed in 2025 that it is “an official email domain used by Microsoft and Xbox for communications.”
Best Buy and Microsoft also have a preexisting business relationship. In 2025, the two companies paired up for a “new ‘AI That’ campaign” to advertise Microsoft’s Copilot features to customers and across social media. In the same year, Microsoft also announced that Best Buy had “added Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to connect with its existing Tanium endpoint management solution.”
Also, this would be a really rubbish scam. Email scams usually prey on technologically ill-informed elderly folks, who I’m fairly certain do not make up a sizeable chunk of Xbox’s install base.
The preexisting relationship between the two companies could also help explain why Microsoft would risk sending out an email like this, which naturally has resulted in them getting clowned online. Perhaps Microsoft is getting a cut of the trade-in money, or maybe this is a quid-pro-quo kind of situation that will result in Best Buy doing something equally laughable in the future.
