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Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

hey.paris

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Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#231

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

stavros wrote: post #212
pflenker wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gift cards are huge in the B2B business as they are used a lot as gifts from companies to employees.

Seems like restricting their purchase to companies would be an easy way to prevent fraud.

In the US, gift cards seem to be popular with consumers.

I regularly see people in line at the supermarket, buying gift cards. I notice, because it’s a discrete workflow, that stands out.

I doubt they are all feeding scammers.

I think that charities often solicit gift cards.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#232

Post by stavros »

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #230
stavros wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would make more sense to stop offering gift cards, which make zero financial sense for the consumer, but why stop offering a lucrative product that people buy because they're bad at logic, when you can just shut down accounts and greatly inconvenience people at no cost to you?

It’s a financial gimmick. The company realizes the income immediately while service is rendered later. This has positive impact on the finances.

Well yes, obviously, and the company doesn't have to pay anything for the cost of locking you out of all your work files forever and costing you however much, so it's all upside for them.

If they had to reimburse you for the cost of all your lost files, then we'd see the real impact on finances.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#233

Post by frigg »

What I've learned from all these disaster stories: have backups for everythig. I have an iCloud+ subscription but also a OneDrive subscription, photos are sync'ed to both storages. On gmail, I set up fwd for all emails to another email address (non-Google related) just in case. Of course you can't do this for every service but do it for the ones you can.

On a meta note, Fuck Apple, I'm so glad I didn't pursue an iOS developer career 10 years ago.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#235

Post by stavros »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #231
stavros wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like restricting their purchase to companies would be an easy way to prevent fraud.

In the US, gift cards seem to be popular with consumers. I regularly see people in line at the supermarket, buying gift cards. I notice, because it’s a discrete workflow, that stands out. I doubt they are all feeding scammers. I think that charities often solicit gift cards.

I'm sure they're not all scammers, but what's the upside to the consumer? Why not just give the money directly? Seems to me like all the upside is on the company, and all the risk is on the user.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#236

Post by jfoster »

celpgoescheeew wrote: post #228

I hope he learns, does backups and switches to hardware without walled garden baked in, without the company being the real owner of your belongings.

It's really difficult to give up the convenience of cloud-based accounts. It would be nice for regulators to step up and protect consumers when it comes to this kind of thing.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#237

Post by plutokras »

thelittleone wrote: post #207
Beijinger wrote: post #9

Since your money is gone, I would file a complaint here: ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission): The primary enforcer of gift card laws, ensuring businesses comply with the three-year minimum expiry, clear terms, and fair practices.

It's baffling that gift cards are so popular. You're essentially paying to decrease the value of your own money by restricting its use and adding an expiration date (and handing to someone as a gift as if it's a thoughtful alternative to cash). An even more egregious case is the corporate credit card. The company dictates its use exclusively for business expenses, yet pushes all the liability onto the employee. The b…

I still don't get why my friends and family think gifting a less liquid form of money is better than just giving cash.

Gift cards are the best proof against the existence of the homo economicus, that's for sure.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#238

Post by subscribed »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #115
kingleopold wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with this same logic, you don't want to know how much your government and your country cares about you. odds are even a lot lower for them.

Why would my government care less about me than a multinational corporation with billions of customers that isn't headquartered or listed where I live? My Member of Parliament represents about 130,000 people, does regular door knocking to talk to people, and has a staffed office a few km away the I can walk into anytime I want. None of that applies to a multinational corporation.

You're lucky and this is not a representative of the politicians at all.

In my Parliament MPs seem to represent primarily the interests of their donors, not those of their country, not even constituents. It still better than it used to be, the corr...., er lobbying is not as blatant, but its still obvious.

Seeing the MP? Yeah. Maybe if someone lives in the "unsafe seat" area and the MP is trying to get reelected:)

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#239

Post by jasode »

x3sphere wrote: post #32

It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account. But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email…

>It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this.

It's also the buying of gift cards that can get Apple accounts locked: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/r8b1lu/apple_will_pe...

If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans.

- Don't give Apple gift cards to family and friends: You're potentially ruining the recipient's digital life if they redeem it.

- Don't buy Apple gift cards: You risk ruining your own digital life.

If you've been given an Apple gc for Christmas -- and you have paranoia of the risks -- don't buy anything online that's tied to your Apple ID. Instead, go to the physical Apple store to redeem it. And don't buy an iPhone with it because that will eventually get assigned to an Apple ID. Instead, get a non-AppleID item such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sock.

I have thousands of credit-card reward points that could be traded in for Apple gift cards but I don't do it because Apple's over-aggressive fraud tracking means Apple's store currency is too dangerous to use.

Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

#240

Post by halapro »

foobarkey wrote: post #234

Just talk to a lawyer, have the lawyer send a letter, there is no need to bang head against CS for escalation

That "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I'm not confident that this would prevent data loss and that it would act in a reasonable time scale.
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