261–270 of 1001 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is one of the worst stories I’ve seen yet. It sounds like they were “all in” on Apple with zero backups, which shows some questionable judgment, but still, this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.) Maybe hosts should be required to mail you a hard drive with your data on it when th…
I once had to help a relative sue a bank who had closed his account after he refused to answer their very intrusive questions (they wanted to know details about distant relatives living in another country). They also refused to return his money (tens of thousands) and refused to explain why. No amount of complaining or escalating made any difference, although we did manage to get a nice recording of an employee saying that he thought the bank was in the wrong.
It took me issuing court proceedings, plus several more months of negotiating with their lawyer, before they finally settled out of court. Even then they tried to not pay the court fee, and they tried to get us to sign an NDA (I refused to budge on both). Altogether, it took 6 months to get the money.
Similar to how people in this thread are talking about mitigating reliance on cloud providers (e.g. with offline backups), I now do not trust any bank. I avoid being in a position where any one bank can ruin my life. That means having multiple accounts and spreading my money around.
Luckily for me I have a legal background so when a corp (big or small) does this sort of thing to me I don't hesitate to sue them. In almost all cases this causes them to "wake up" and start taking your issue seriously, in a way that the front line customer support reps never do. I recommend this to the author of the original post.
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 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?
Not in all situations. Because of various cross promotions between car insurance, supermarket and airlines, by using gift cards for groceries I get an effective ~9% discount every time. That really adds up over a year.
For Apple and others, you can use secondary gift card market to get some discounts too, if you wanna risk it.
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…
I don’t mean to defend this, but I know from experience that gift cards are frequently used for money laundring. The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives. At the same time, AML solutions tend to be a closely guarded black box which simply tells you to block a customer, finding out why is pretty difficult. To add more to the problem, some anti money Landry s…
(edit) Ah, right, anti-money-laundering, found it in your last sentence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>That is in no way a reasonable suggestion. You’re suggesting a raspberry pi (first red flag) along with a command line program. This is not reasonable in any sense of the word. Uh, the guy writes programming books for a living. But since he's all-in Apple he could just use Time Machine to some sort of NAS and get a more streamlined version of the above.
It’s not reasonable because you’re assuming that 1) they have the time to set up that network infrastructure 2) their skills align with that 3) they have the knowledge to do so 4) they live in a country without strong regulations that would make such a thing unnecessary. Just because you know objective-c doesn’t mean you know a damn thing about raspberry pis, backup programs, NASes, or anything else. It doesn’t mean…
> he’s already stated he doesn’t have a 6tb drive
Someone who uses a $500 gift card to renew subscriptions could afford one
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t mean to defend this, but I know from experience that gift cards are frequently used for money laundring. The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives. At the same time, AML solutions tend to be a closely guarded black box which simply tells you to block a customer, finding out why is pretty difficult. To add more to the problem, some anti money Landry s…
AML = ? (edit) Ah, right, anti-money-laundering, found it in your last sentence.
My 2 cents: There was a time when I accidentally deleted some photos of which I had only one copy. I blamed myself for being stupid not having a copy but also money was tight for additional drives. Then there is this: depending on a service provider and then blaming them for something like this. The problem is that now you are losing trust in service providers (of which there should be little to begin with) and on to…
I think this argument conflates “what’s possible” with “what’s reasonable”. In a complex modern society, we can’t all be expected to have backup plans to the Nth degree. Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install solar+inverter/battery backup for electricity, get a medical degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it’s not reasonable. It’s why we have regulations and ombudsmans for healthcar…
Bad analogy. A better one would be having a torch in case of power cuts (done that) having some extra food in the house in case the grocery delivery fails, having some basic medical supplies in the house, having mobile internet connection in case your broadband fails etc.
Having backups of your stuff is an emergency fallback
> Support staff refused to tell me why the account was banned or provide specific details on the decision. That‘s always the most kafkaesque part of these problems and should be illegal
it is very likely illegal to tell him. it was triggered by the use of a gift card, and therefore very likely to be AML, and in many places (I am not sure about Australia specifically) it is illegal to provide information in the circumstances.