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Comment by surlyadopter | Hacker News Reader

I have an ancient minecraft account (so old I paypal'ed 9 euro to Mojang) that doesn't have an email associated with it. Does anybody have experience with MS helping recover an older MC account?

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I'm in a similar situation. From what I could find the easiest way to resolve the issue is to report the original transaction ID [1], if you still have access to it.

They list the instructions for PayPal:

> The PayPal transaction ID is a seventeen-character alphanumeric code: 1AB23456C7890123D

> To locate this transaction ID, log into your PayPal account and find the ID in your transaction history. If you no longer have access to your PayPal account, or if you made a purchase that doesn’t appear in your transaction history, you must contact PayPal to request the ID.

[1] https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360029977371-Wh...

I tried this process twice in the past two years. Despite providing them with the original PayPal receipt and transaction ID, and still having control of the original email address that the receipt was sent to, and even knowing the original UUID of my user account, I was told that they were unable to verify my identity because:

> we've had some issues with searching for PayPal transaction IDs lately. We may not be able to use the PayPal transaction ID alone.

Sucks to be me, I guess. It would probably make more sense to just pay for a new account than to try arguing with them again, but I'm stubborn enough to stand on principle.

I had to do that A few years ago. (Same thing, early PayPal). I had an old email attached to it I no longer had access too. I was able to email support and give them some information such as purchase date (that was frankly not super specific but was worth a shot. I'm talking very, very vague dates) and they were able to transfer the account to me.

I'm in that boat (it's my only OG nerd cred). I did that process. Reach out to their support. They'll have you provide the paypal transaction ID, purchase dates, and a new e-mail. They take it from there.

It really wasn't that hard.

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