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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

#681

Post by type0 »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #572
cameldrv wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a combination of money laundering and phone scams where people are told they owe money to the IRS or something and are tricked into buying a bunch of gift cards. That said, if buying and redeeming gift cards are such an indicator of fraud that people are legitimately afraid of getting their accounts permanently locked, why doesn't Apple just stop selling them?

Apple keeps money from the gift card after banning you. Just business, nothing personal.

Digital feudalism

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

#682

Post by Marsymars »

g947o wrote: post #580
jeroenhd wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gift cards are great for companies you don't trust with (up-to-date) payment details. Amazon, Google, Apple, whatever evil megacorp you can think of, they all have made the news with stories like these, and they have proven time and again that they will stand by and defend their arbitrary decisions in court if they have to, because involving basic human intellect in the chain is too much of a fraud risk. Even if you…

This story proves that none of it matters if your money along with your account vanish because the megacorp doesn't like your gift card for whatever reason. In fact, it is far worse than paying with a credit card directly in terms of risk. At least, when something goes wrong (which rarely ever happens), the bank has your back. On the other hand, I have seen too many cases where people find their gift card codes inval…

> At least, when something goes wrong (which rarely ever happens), the bank has your back.

Not really helpful when your account is the important thing though, you can't do a chargeback without your account getting banned.

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

#683

Post by nullfield »

ryandrake wrote: post #673
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…

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 j…

The only “use cases” I’ve seen are discount or niche. For example, Target and Bass Pro Shops/Cabelas in the US both offered some kind of 5 or 10 percent back/discount around Black Friday on gift cards. Niche would fall into, generally, some small enough business that these messes aren’t likely to happen, where the point of the gift is specifically later-consumption, like a local coffee place that you know someone loves, or say a specialty herbs and spices place for a cook (where you wouldn’t know exactly what they want from there, but that they WOULD be delighted to get something from the place).

Otherwise? Yeah. Gift / prepaid credit cards are a horrible scam, because they tend to have a percentage or, worse, flat fee to activate. $4 extra on a $50 card as a gift means you just paid 8 percent just to GET the card.

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

#684

Post by andreashaerter »

I don't get the mostly black/white "Self-host" vs. "Mega-Corp" discussions as there is a middle ground: smaller managed service providers (even: 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. Mail, CalDAV/CardDAV, Immich, Nextcloud, OpenCloud, OpenTalk, web hosting, Kubernetes, simple VMs.. whatever ... fully managed, run by local or independent providers or by the company behind projects, without Big Tech lock-in. If chosen wisely, you can migrate, take over, or bring it in-house when you want. Just spend a few bucks and do some company research. Same as you would when choosing craftsmen, lawyers or something else.

For example, that's actually how we operate as a company for some of our customers and even a few single persons: we provide SaaS AND setup documentation. Customers can transparently take over at any time. We even help separate domains, credentials, and administration from us. Convenience without captivity. I am sure there are hundreds of shops like ours, providing comparable services for people in their wider neighborhood.

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

#685

Post by chias »

tomrod wrote: post #644
rationalist wrote: post #557

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.)

Proton allows you to alias. But a lot of places prevent aliases, which is silly. I shouldn't have to give an email to demo your chatbot.

Then proton becomes your single point of failure.

"But I use my addresses on my own domain" ok your domain registrar, then.

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

#686

Post by Marsymars »

otterley wrote: post #156

Out of curiosity, why did you buy and redeem such a large gift card instead of paying directly? And was this a form of payment that was unusual in light of your account history?

FWIW, in my country credit cards make up about a third of payment volume - gift cards let people fund their Apple Account without a credit card.

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

#687

Post by 29athrowaway »

sitzkrieg wrote: post #248
29athrowaway wrote: post #163

Richard Stallman warned us about this.

those who laughed at him are waxing poetic about local backups at the moment

Well, there are funny things about the guy, such as the video where he eats something from his foot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ

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

#688

Post by pirates »

rvnx wrote: post #621
zygentoma wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google allows email suffices a la my account+anything@gmail.com. So you can use different email addresses for different accounts while having only one Gmail account.

Little trick: You can also randomly insert dots in your email address, a bit more stealth and compatible with more sites :)

This has worked for me for nearly 20 years (when I made the account I didn’t know that the dots are ignored). The only time it’s been a problem was with one company whose system stripped the dots out.

You need to send them an email to cancel. When I tried they said “you need to cancel from the same email you signed up with.” :/

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

#689

Post by nullfield »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #668
quickthrowman wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not trying to be rude, but what is the point of buying and then redeeming gift cards yourself? I just pay Apple with my credit card when I want to buy something. Is this some kind of weird credit card rewards churning thing? Are you unbanked? I don’t understand why you’d voluntarily add unnecessary extra steps. A credit card offers far more protections to consumers than a gift card. Given the amount of false posi…

If you want to trade in an old phone without doing it at the time you purchase a new one, the only way to receive the trade in value is via an Apple gift card. I was looking forward to getting $160 gift card for my old iPhone 11 but after reading all this I think I’ll just leave it in a drawer.

Not so. I just traded in/upgraded (on a Verizon contract, but AT the Apple Store; maybe that affects this… but still paying Apple directly) and they handed me the new phone and had FedEx send a trade-in mailer that I had a while to send back with my trade-in.

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

#690

Post by duxup »

colechristensen wrote: post #625
1970-01-01 wrote: post #556

The untapped answer is litigation. Call a lawyer and file against Apple. It may take several business days, and cost $$$$ but it will absolutely light a fire at Apple and get the attention of many-a-human. And if they ignore it, well, maybe a class action lawsuit awaits.

And, importantly, go through with the lawsuit. Figure out how to quantify damages to yourself by being deprived of access to your account so even if they restore access you can continue the suit.

>go through with the lawsuit

That's a big ask.

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