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

161–170 of 479 posts

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#161

Post by Steve16384 »

ryandrake wrote: post #56
estimator7292 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks frequently completely freeze accounts for no discernable reason and with zero communication, support, or recourse. You're just lucky that it hasn't happened to you. That does not mean it doesn't happen to anyone.

What I want to know is why does it always have to go straight from 0 to 100? There's seemingly no concept of proportion. For most online services, your account can be in one of two states: Totally good and "banned for life". There's no warning, no investigative period, no concept of scale (was the fraud $10 or $10,000?), no way to serve your time and come back if you actually were bad. It's just instant, silent BAN H…

The same with Youtube. Broken an unknown rule on one of your vids? Your whole account and all the videos are deleted instantly.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#162

Post by astrange »

criddell wrote: post #129
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#2 doesn't scale. If you guarantee access to a human, the system will absolutely be effectively DoS'd by scammers trying to social engineer their way into access to someone's account.

If the companies are too big to provide reasonable levels of support for their users, then the companies are simply too big.

A smaller company is even less able to deal with fraud. You wouldn't have the product at all.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#163

Post by hamdingers »

masfuerte wrote: post #152
hamdingers wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I previously worked in fraud/risk at a major ecommerce platform. On my biggest day I closed 60,000 accounts. In one day. I knew other agents who'd done 10x that. The scale of this work is unfathomable to those who have only been on the consumer side of it. #1 is doable but would destroy our ability to combat fraud. "Here's how not to get banned next time" is not an email anyone in this space would consider sending. #…

How many of those 60,000 accounts had made ten of thousands of dollars of purchases over decades?

The comment I responded to offered no such qualifiers.

To answer in general, aging of accounts is common as is synthetic credibility-building activity. There are marketplaces where you can buy sets of years old accounts with activity for every major platform. Anything you could come up with would either be so stringent it would exclude most users or be easy enough to become a target for account sellers.

To be honest this is why I got out of the space, it's sisyphean.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#164

Post by IshKebab »

vablings wrote: post #31
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…

Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors. It's very likely that they have metrics for larger marketplaces about being below a threshold for fraud. Online game stores like steam live, breathe and die by payment processing. This was the reason why free trade was removed from RuneScape back in the day and it wasn't even a Jagex issue. People would go to 3rd party gold selling websites and…

> Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors

I disagree. The issue is these huge platforms can arbitrarily ban people and consumers have no recourse.

This sort of thing wasn't really possible before the internet age. We need new laws to deal with it.

Banks are nothing to do with this. You could have your Steam/Google/Apple/etc. account summarily executed for any reason; it doesn't have to be money-related.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#165

Post by zahlman »

wat10000 wrote: post #77
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…

And yet they continue to sell these cards. Why? It's simple: they're essentially free money. The worst case for them is that the recipient of the card uses the full amount of the card. In that case, the issuer "only" makes the full profit on those sales. Often they do better: the card is used partially or not at all, then lost or forgotten about. You can see how lucrative they are by looking at promotions. You can of…

> Why would you sell a dollar for 90 cents? Because you know that on average you're selling quite a bit less than a dollar.

There's more to it than covering the risk of fraud. It's more about optionality. The gift card only allows for buying things at one place — so you're restricted in what you can buy, can't deposit it at a bank, can't comparison shop etc.

I don't get the sense that money being left on the card is a serious issue for the sort of person who goes hunting for deals like this. They'll eventually spend more than the card's value and have the last of it apply partially to some purchase.

Also the discount rates I've seen have been more like buying the $100 card for $95 or $97. Except perhaps where the gift card retailer is offering it directly as part of a cross-promotion deal with the target retailer.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#166

Post by ndriscoll »

mariusor wrote: post #156
ndriscoll wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they've changed recently, I thought GOG's platform itself does not have DRM? Steam does provide DRM and doesn't tell you if a game uses it, though as far as I know there are generic tools to bypass it. GOG also specifically advertises games that don't have DRM, e.g. [0]. Steam versions of the same game (e.g. Skyrim) often require Steam to be running and enforce mandatory updates that aren't always desirable wi…

> Steam versions of the same game (e.g. Skyrim) often require Steam to be running and enforce mandatory updates that aren't always desirable with no rollback ability. Yeah, but that's a developer choice. Steam doesn't force anyone to use their API for things like that. If that's a concern for someone as a gamer, they should probably support the companies that don't do it no matter the platform, not blame Steam for it…

The original question was "how do you know these things before you buy the game?" My answer was "You could buy from a provider that advertises non-use of DRM like GOG." Whether it's a developer choice is irrelevant. GOG tells you the information you need for your purchasing decision, so if you want to know what you're buying, buy from somewhere like GOG. Also, don't assume that because it's DRM-free on GOG, it is also DRM-free elsewhere like Steam.

Buying a DRM-free copy on GOG seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do even if a company has DRM on Steam; it provides an economic signal that there's some segment of customers that requires no DRM as a condition of sale. Since marginal cost of digital "goods" is ~0 and it's likely trivial to disable DRM in your build, it would be dumb not to cater to them and take your free money.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#167

Post by browningstreet »

oidar wrote: post #7

I'm glad that got resolved for Paris, but what the hell is a normal person supposed to do. Not every one has that kind of public reach to get a satisfactory resolution. First he had understand what happened technically, then he needed a public platform to tell people about it, then that writing needed to get reposted by others, than PR needed to get involved. Not something that's going to happen for a normal user. Ap…

We expect RCAs when tech companies have major outages, this situation deserves a public one from Apple, too. I'm sure we won't get one though.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#168

Post by Obscurity4340 »

They also need to let you transfer your purchases to a new AppleID under a new enail address. It is outrageous you're forced to choose between all your purchases from an email account name from when you were a kid or teen and getting to have an adult email address/handle and not having a data hungry company like Google or Microsoft seeing all your Apple activity in perpetuity

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#169

Post by bigyabai »

crazygringo wrote: post #115
DannyPage wrote: post #14

> Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obvi…

> 1) Why would redeeming a bad gift card result in a complete shut-down of the account? Because they assume you stole the gift card and are therefore a criminal. As to why they're making the assumption that you are the criminal, not the actual criminal who successfully redeemed the gift card first, you've got me. Since either situation is possible. > 2) Why is it seemingly impossible to get any support now unless you…

"No Way To Fix This" Claims Only Digital Ecosystem Where Catastrophic Lockout Regularly Happens

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#170

Post by Lammy »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #150
isodev wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has created an entire programming language (Swift) as part of their "marketing toolbox". > genuinely serious about preserving user privacy Nope, not anymore. That ship has sailed and more revenue is to be made by harvesting user data

> That ship has sailed and more revenue is to be made by harvesting user data That does seem to call for supporting evidence. I write Apple apps, and they make it very difficult to access user data. I would need to know how they get it, and how they make money from it.

Put an iPhone on your Wi-Fi and log how often it calls out to some Apple web service. You might be shocked, or does it make it okay when Apple themselves are the ones it's impossible to have privacy from?
Post reply on HN