Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 479 posts

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#61

Post by criddell »

sneak wrote: post #27
Apreche wrote: post #18

The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. Even if they have real humans to talk to, they simply follow a script. Those agents do not have the ability to investigate a situation or the power to use their discretion to take meaningful action. We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers. 1. If they…

> The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. No, the real problem is that we have no reasonable alternatives when companies misbehave. There is no meaningful way to exist in society today without an Apple or Google account, and that's actually insane. It's doubly insane for people who aren't citizens of the United States (although the CCP addressed this…

Cash being more useful wouldn't help you regain access to your photos, music, email, etc... when your account has been deactivated..

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#62

Post by ryandrake »

colechristensen wrote: post #23

Recent customer service experiences: - HN banned me for being a robot! (I'm not) dang unblocked me 1 hour 4 minutes after an email (thanks dang!) - A Marriott hotel clerk booked me a duplicate room instead of using my third party paid reservation After 45 minutes on the phone on hold and arguing with robots, I got a person who hung up on me in the middle of investigating the issue, I issued a credit card chargeback b…

Chargeback has become the only way to get any justice out of companies anymore. It used to be the last resort--the point where you have tried everything and customer support won't budge. Now it's sometimes your only option because customer support doesn't even exist.

I swear, I've probably done a single chargeback from all of 1995-2015, yet I've done at least five from 2015-2025.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#63

Post by lxgr »

sneak wrote: post #27
Apreche wrote: post #18

The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. Even if they have real humans to talk to, they simply follow a script. Those agents do not have the ability to investigate a situation or the power to use their discretion to take meaningful action. We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers. 1. If they…

> The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. No, the real problem is that we have no reasonable alternatives when companies misbehave. There is no meaningful way to exist in society today without an Apple or Google account, and that's actually insane. It's doubly insane for people who aren't citizens of the United States (although the CCP addressed this…

> There is no meaningful way to exist in society today without an Apple or Google account

As is the case for many other infrastructure companies, such as your local electricity network operator (or even supplier depending on market liberalization). We also didn't solve that problem by ensuring everyone's right to run a generator in their backyard or heat their city apartment with a coal oven.

If tech companies have become essential to our day to day lives and are not willing to allow for horizontal interoperability, i.e. to split over-the-top services from infrastructure and individual elements of infrastructure from each other – because walled garden lock-in undoubtedly increases profits – why not regulate them as infrastructure entirely?

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#64

Post by wat10000 »

sneak wrote: post #27
Apreche wrote: post #18

The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. Even if they have real humans to talk to, they simply follow a script. Those agents do not have the ability to investigate a situation or the power to use their discretion to take meaningful action. We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers. 1. If they…

> The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. No, the real problem is that we have no reasonable alternatives when companies misbehave. There is no meaningful way to exist in society today without an Apple or Google account, and that's actually insane. It's doubly insane for people who aren't citizens of the United States (although the CCP addressed this…

China is quite a bit worse. Not having an Apple or Google account in the US would be kind of inconvenient. Not having WeChat Pay or AliPay in China means you can't buy stuff most places. They've ensured that their de-facto-mandatory services are domestic, but they're a lot more mandatory.

I assume the Chinese government is quite happy with this, because they have no trouble bringing their large companies to heel, unlike the US. And centralizing payments like this gives them a great deal of information and control.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#65

Post by Workaccount2 »

Apreche wrote: post #18

The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. Even if they have real humans to talk to, they simply follow a script. Those agents do not have the ability to investigate a situation or the power to use their discretion to take meaningful action. We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers. 1. If they…

The real real problem are shameless shitheads that will abuse anything to any length the run scams or malware distributions.

"Yes support tech, please understand my child just died of cancer and my wife in a car accident last week and the only pictures I have of them are on my bitcoin4free@gmail.com account!"

Google probably also bans thousands of accounts a day. And suddenly every single one of them needs a full human appeal review. Because jamming up the system is (short term) beneficial to these shitheads.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#66

Post by [deleted] »

wat10000 wrote: post #64
sneak wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support. No, the real problem is that we have no reasonable alternatives when companies misbehave. There is no meaningful way to exist in society today without an Apple or Google account, and that's actually insane. It's doubly insane for people who aren't citizens of the United States (although the CCP addressed this…

China is quite a bit worse. Not having an Apple or Google account in the US would be kind of inconvenient. Not having WeChat Pay or AliPay in China means you can't buy stuff most places. They've ensured that their de-facto-mandatory services are domestic, but they're a lot more mandatory. I assume the Chinese government is quite happy with this, because they have no trouble bringing their large companies to heel, unl…

[deleted]

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#67

Post by dylan604 »

ndriscoll wrote: post #57
sigseg1v wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. A situation similar to this happened to me with Steam over a payment issue with their service. They banned me even though I had thousands of dollars of games and an account since Sept 2003. I had to go to my bank and escalate multiple times to get letters providing the info steam wanted about my account and credit card to prove it was legitimate. Eventually after contacting them enough times they said they wo…

They've made it clear that you don't own your cloud library, so the only reasonable answer is to never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove (including things that require an online account for functionality you consider important), and treat services like Steam as a temporary convenience to download known good files that you then fix to remove any DRM. If you only treat these services as a download tool, thei…

I'm not an avid gamer, so maybe this is a naive question, but how do you know these things before you buy the game?

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#69

Post by bombcar »

Mistletoe wrote: post #16
srmatto wrote: post #10

This fiasco stirs up a lot of different topics for me, none of which seem like they are likely to be resolved anytime soon. First, with so much importance placed on an Apple/iCloud account in our current era it's not good that they can be shutdown so trivially. Someone can be shut out from using Messages, Apple Wallet, Digital Identification (depending on where they live) and all their subscriptions and media purchas…

I’m realizing maybe I should just use Amazon or iCloud AND Google Photos for backing up my images. My whole life is in Google Photos. I could lose it from something stupid and never even have a person to contact about that.

Shutterfly will upload all your photos and store them for free if you buy a few magnets on sale now and then. Works from iPhone well enough and it's my "third backup."

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#70

Post by eduction »

citrin_ru wrote: post #40
tiffanyh wrote: post #34

I don’t want to minimize the pain people experience here, but it’s worth calling out just how hard this problem is for retailers and issuers. Gift cards are the #1 fraud vector in payments ... because it lets stolen cards be converted into a cash-like equivalent with zero traceability. So fraud/risk system are highly sensitive to gift cards. It's not an excuse, but I see in this thread people minimizing the problem a…

How it's zero traceability if Apple can see: 1. credit card used to by a gift card 2. who exactly redeemed a gift card. It can be traced, the problem that they block accounts (probably using on FP prone algorithm) even if a gift card was not purchased using a stolen credit card.

Apple only sees the credit card if you buy from them, if you buy from a retailer they don’t get that info.

To be clear, this is their problem, not the customers.

Still, I’m curious what the scammer did in this case. If a retail worker just stole the card number it would merely be used up, not flagged as fraud. Maybe someone in the supply chain obtained the number and reported it lost/stolen? And used that to obtain a new card no one would complain about once it was used? Vs the original number which would result in a customer complaint. Idk.

Post reply on HN