Xbox Live's director of programming Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb issues a reminder against sharing Xbox Live accounts and tampering with Xbox 360 game saves in order to "artificially increase your Gamerscore or obtain achievements". Failure to play by the rules (in other words following the Xbox LIVE Terms of Use) could result in getting your Gamerscore and/or achievements wiped out entirely, with no chance of earning back the lost achievements. XBL users found guilty of manipulating their Gamerscores and achievements could also stand to have their Gamertag or even their console banned from accessing XBL services.

If you decide to employ some nefarious techniques to artificially increase your Gamerscore or obtain achievements by manipulating the Xbox software without playing the game, bad things will happen. What type of bad things? For one thing we may remove the entire Gamerscore for an account that contains manipulated gamerscore. Let me be more clear: If you use tampered gamesaves to boost your Achievements and Gamerscore, you may sign in to Xbox LIVE one day and discover that we have removed your Gamerscore. Once we do that, you will never be able to re-earn those achievements on that account. Even worse, you might have your account and/or console banned from Xbox Live.

As you can imagine, we know how to find out if you do this and we do take action. And we'll continue to do so.

Sounds heavy handed for something like an online score, but Microsoft appears to be serious in maintaining a community of gamers of all skill levels who have earned their achievements.