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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

#381

Post by jack_tripper »

dariosalvi78 wrote: post #361
jasode wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 potenti…

An even better advice: Don't buy Apple.

BSD, Linux or TempleOS would never lock you out.

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

#382

Post by jack_tripper »

queenkjuul wrote: post #380
monerozcash wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emailing jeff@amazon rapidly solved the problem for me when I was in the exactly same situation. Of course it'd have been nicer to tell them to fuck off, but living without Amazon would simply be far too inconvenient.

Are you in the US? I'm just always a little surprised to read things like "i couldn't live without Amazon," and i wonder if there are no other alternatives for two day shipping on other countries or what it is that keeps people stuck on Amazon instead of using other next-day deliveries

It's not that Amazon is irreplaceable, but sometimes it's the best option by far depending on where you live and what you're looking for.

I'm in Austria (not Australia) and local retail prices are infamous for being 25% to 100% higher than in neighboring Germany for the same stuff because of cartel behavior of local retail industry.

Buying from amazon Germany means I can get the same prices as Germans (with +1% extra for higher Austrian VAT) for the same goods.

I'd love to give up Amazon in favor of local stores but local cartels are just as bad or even worse.

So to fix the Amazon problem you need to fix the competition problem first, which is caused by players other than Amazon too.

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

#383

Post by lapcat »

noitpmeder wrote: post #364
wiseowise wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So taking a wrong turn should result in you being mugged, raped and subsequently killed because apparently there was some "safe", but less convenient, passage? You're not helping OSS by making claims like these.

Obviously you're being facetious, that is not at all what that poster is claiming. While I agree that entering a dark alley shouldn't result in ill effects, if ill effects happen in said dark alley it is still worth the discussion to remind people to stay out of dark alleys in today's day and age (or until the root problem, whatever it is, is improved). Pretending that it is OK to enter dark alleys and forcing blame…

> While I agree that entering a dark alley shouldn't result in ill effects, if ill effects happen in said dark alley it is still worth the discussion to remind people to stay out of dark alleys in today's day and age (or until the root problem, whatever it is, is improved).

This is not a dark alley. It's the main street. It's the world we live in. iPhone has more than half the market share in the US and well over a billion users worldwide. Moreover, Apple, Google, and Microsoft collectively monopolize consumer operating systems on both mobile and desktop. Try going into a retail store and buying a computing device that is not running iOS, Android, macOS, or Windows. That's the reality for most people.

The dark alleys are the non-mainstream options that hardly anyone knows about.

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

#384

Post by monerozcash »

queenkjuul wrote: post #380
monerozcash wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emailing jeff@amazon rapidly solved the problem for me when I was in the exactly same situation. Of course it'd have been nicer to tell them to fuck off, but living without Amazon would simply be far too inconvenient.

Are you in the US? I'm just always a little surprised to read things like "i couldn't live without Amazon," and i wonder if there are no other alternatives for two day shipping on other countries or what it is that keeps people stuck on Amazon instead of using other next-day deliveries

I live between central London and a smaller European city, the competition is generally much much worse.

Sure, for every individual item there might be a better better local option. I'd have to spend time finding that, then go through the terrible order process and hope their delivery service isn't utter shit. Oh, and yeah, half the time they'll probably block my order because I'm using a non-european card.

Just being able to use Amazon for almost everything starting from bottled water and toilet paper saves me immense amounts of time. I can generally trust that the stuff I order reliably arrives at the concierge, which isn't a given.

And FWIW, most of the time I've shopped around, Amazon has been cheaper or essentially the same price. Doesn't really matter to me, but it is a plus. I'd happily pay more for a more convenient service, but in this case it seems I'm usually paying less.

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

#385

Post by cosmic_cheese »

adhamsalama wrote: post #336
userbinator wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux and the other unices are great for their CLI, but GUIs seem more like an afterthought on that side.

I find KDE Plasma to be much better than Windows and MacOS.

While Plasma is among the better desktop options, it’s still something of an acquired taste, being a significantly different flavor from either mainstream commercial OS (and particularly un-Mac-like). I know some like it, but having used it on various single-purpose machines of my own I don’t think I could make it the desktop of my daily driver or work machines.

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

#386

Post by novoreorx »

If I were the person at Apple in charge of this kind of matter, I would ignore this case, just as I do for other regular people. Everyone should be equally not cared for by Apple. That's how Apple sucks in a way I can accept myself still using their product.

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

#387

Post by xtiansimon »

Nightmare.

The stories of online-only service failures are legion. And yet if you can get face to face support, even one person can do so much. The gap is infuriating.

I didn’t notice, do you have a Brick and Mortar Apple Store you can visit? I can’t help thinking this as I read the post.

Of course this is not a physical hardware issue. Where a store employee could just hand you, say, a new phone. This is on the level of getting a slot on Tim Cook’s day planner, though I imagine the person with the ability to fix this is an underling many levels down Cook on the org chart.

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

#388

Post by stephen_g »

jmpman wrote: post #300

My son was just scammed out of $1000 using some gift card scam. Typically these gift cards cannot be revoked once issued and anyone using the gift cards (like the people who scammed my son) would be able to reap the rewards without any consequences. I’m hopeful that Apple has found a way to track fraudulent Apple Gift cards and are now locking people’s Apple ID who use them. I suspect there’s more to the story than i…

From other comments explaining the kind of scams running at the moment, one possible scenario is that the card may have been taken, tampered with by a scammer (and the code recorded), and then placed back in the supermarket, with the scammer waiting until the OP purchased it and it was activated at the checkout.

Perhaps between the scammer redeeming it and the poster then trying to redeem by entering the same code, the scammer’s account was flagged and then the OP’s account terminated along with the scammer for using the same code (even though the OP had done nothing wrong).

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

#389

Post by queenkjuul »

embedding-shape wrote: post #333
mcherm wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think the laws are dictating Apple to completely turn off the accounts, but instead dictate that Apple should take measures against it. You misunderstand the nature of financial regulation. The laws on things like money laundering are intentionally vague, they say things like "Apple should take measures against it". And financial regulators will not come out and say (especially in writing) that you MUST do…

> Because the financial regulators have the ability to simply close down your business You misunderstand how business regulation works in free countries. Financial regulators can't just "simply close down your business" however they want, unless you live in a country that is primarily authoritarian. Again, I'm not saying closing down accounts isn't easier than turning of functionality, but companies could chose the "…

Every company's priority has always been "make more money above all," it's just that once upon a time some of them beloved that treating their workers and customers well was a part of that goal. History has shown them that wasn't really necessary.

And don't think for a second the US federal government couldn't do a huge amount of damage to anyone it feels like by way of its financial regulators. In general it's better for the US government if Apple continues to exist, though.

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

#390

Post by Nevermark »

dariosalvi78 wrote: post #361
jasode wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 potenti…

An even better advice: Don't buy Apple.

This isn’t a solution for many people.

And in fact, a prohibition is never a solution, it is a reduction in solution options

And this advice takes into account exactly zero aspects of the particular problems a given person may have to solve, besides “problems with Apple”, in a world where most people have “problems with X” for each of the few large ecosystems.

Freedom of choice would mean for N choices, being able to make, well, N indepointed choices. N may be a very large number given how many things people do.

For an ideal world of compatible modular technologies, N choices is easy.

But our technology world is highly non-modular, centralized at many levels, and full of incompatibilities and dependencies of various kinds and costs. Including important dependencies involving the choices of other people we interact with, or very specific tools or resources.

So no, “Don’t buy Apple” is not better advice, it is just bad random generic advice, without knowing a lot more about any particular situation.

Like what someone writes books about.

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