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

hey.paris

671–680 of 1001 posts

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

#671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd think so. Yet, the stories of PayPal locking up payouts to surprised people keep coming every year - and people still use them. At least in Europe, PayPal is a regulated bank which means you can hand the case over to the authorities and they can and will help you out.

They aren’t regulated as a bank in the US, where they have a much lighter-touch type of licensing. Do the bank regulators in Europe typically help effectively when PayPal freezes an account?

‘Member States shall ensure that, in the cases referred to in paragraph 4 …, after taking its decision, the credit institution immediately informs the consumer of the refusal and of the specific reason for that refusal, in writing and free of charge, unless such disclosure would be contrary to objectives of national security, public policy or Directive [2005/60]. […]’ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

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

#672
I hope OP can get his account unlocked. This is a good reminder for everyone else, backup your cloud data to a local drive. But thats just one part, the social / email OAUTH side of things, phone accounts etc..., terrible situation. It should be easy enough to walk in a HQ / office and show credible ID and get your account unlocked.

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

#673
post #239

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 potenti…

The "gift card" in general is an anachronism whose time has passed. They have got to go. If companies are going to consider use of gift cards as red flags (as they often are, due to their being key components in money laundering and scams), then society should just abandon them. They are worse in every way than a prepaid credit cards, and in most cases where you want to give someone a gift card, you should probably just give them cash.

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

#674
if you pay for service you should receive some guarantees it is your money, it is crazy that there is no cool-off period where you get banned like this even by mistake or by Apple deciding they do not want to offer a service anymore and allow you to take out your stuff before fully shutting down.

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

#675
post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. That’s 4+ single points of failure. Well, i don't. I have my local file storage. Contacts and Calendar get synched, thats it. These get lcal backups, but aren't important so or so.

Not saying this in a derogatory way, but that pretty much means you are not a "normal" user but someone who is tech savvy enough to not rely on someone else's cloud.

And yet all it takes is buying a piece of hardware and installing an app, something that plenty of "normal" people do every day.

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

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a separate email address for each site is smart, but creating a separate email account for each site is going to be very tedious, and I imagine Google, Yahoo, etc are going to stop you very quickly after you've opened 20+ accounts with the same phone number. (Use a catch-all to have different email addresses for different sites, because when one gets hacked, then the damage is limited.)

Using your own domain that you control for emails also comes with the advantage of easily moving providers, should there be any issues. Hopefully, domain registrars are less prone to locking people out compared to Apple, given cause of the lockout is caused by Apple itself. Reminds me of the time Namecheap stopped doing business with Russian accounts, even then they still gave some time for them to transfer their dom…

Only if you are not locked out of the registrar. Then your only hope is what nobody would squat your domain when it lapses.

Eg: Dynadot decided what my birthdate is a secure pin two years ago. No combination of it works and I'm not even sure if I'm not shadowbanned for the attempts.

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

#677
post #279

Here is how the gift card scam works (in Australia) [Quote] Yes they do still get activated at the checkout. But when you go to redeem, the code is missing the last digit or two so it doesn't work. People take the unactivated gift card, tamper with it to get inside carefully so it's not detectable, scratch and get the code, remove the last digit or two, replace the scratch off layer, put the unactivated gift card bac…

How does the scammer know when the card is activated? Do they just leave a script running, trying over and over to redeem the card until it works?

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

#678

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?

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

Which I find obnoxious - they're taxable benefits, so I'd really rather just have the cash.

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

#679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched an interview with Elon Musk a few years ago (circa 2018?). I'm no fan of him but he was asked about AGI and he kinda just said matter of factly, AI can view humanity as we view anthills. We don't really care about anthills, but if they're in the way of us building a neighborhood in an area then goodbye anthill. I'm not sure if I like that take because of how horrifying it is, but I found it very interesting…

People have been saying that for literal decades before Elon Musk said it.

That doesn’t make it untrue. Welcome to the today’s (whenever today was) lucky 10000, GP.

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

#680
post #619

1. This is a total nightmare, the author has my deepest sympathy. 2. Last time there was a post where this happened to someone, I looked into what you can do if you're locked out of your Apple ID or Google Account. I know people will say "just self host", but all of the self-hosting solutions are not friendly to families or non-tech people. Telling my extended family to tailscale into my server to look at family phot…

> All of the self-hosted solutions are also just way less smooth to use than the built-in integration iCloud or Google Drive gives with devices.

The built-in integrations (iCloud, Google Drive) are smooth right up until you’re locked out or forced into changes you can't control. Obviously.

There is a middle ground though: managed service providers (per-service). You don't have to self-host everything in your basement, and you don't have to hand your entire digital life to Google or Apple either.

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