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

191–200 of 479 posts

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#191

Post by chihuahua »

hamdingers wrote: post #143
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…

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. #…

It's very interesting and helpful to get your insider's perspective on this. I believe that the issue cannot be understood by people sitting on the outside who have no idea about the nature and scale of the fraud attempts.

Still, from your perspective, do you have any opinion on this particular case, other than "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs"?

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#192

Post by dpark »

hamdingers wrote: post #143
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…

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. #…

This is not what small claims court is for. You can go to small claims court and successfully convince a judge that Apple or Google or whoever owes you $500 for shutting down your account. You cannot go to small claims and get a court order that Apple must reinstate your account.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#193

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#194

Post by quesera »

browningstreet wrote: post #183
quesera wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just corporate policy, it's regulatory requirements in the US. You must block financial activity, and you must not communicate any details to the customer, upon reasonable suspicion of money laundering activity. There's a process and a prescribed timeline for getting things resolved. There is no penalty for a false positive, but there are large penalties for false negatives. Having watched hundreds of these…

AML and fraud are different, and the regulatory requirements you're talking about are only one requirement for banks to follow.. they have additional, internal policies of their own that may affect account and money access. If Apple isn't following a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR), then the actions are their own, and the policies are their own.

This is true, but potential money laundering is a UAR, and the issuing bank decides whether to turn that into a SAR (merchants do not file SARs, although at Apple's scale, the conversation between merchant and bank is continuous and both sides will have fraud and AML experts at every step).

The decision to create the SAR will depend on the outputs of the multi-party investigation, which is the thing that takes time and causes visible issues for consumers.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#195

Post by benoau »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #76
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…

> as they are both in the advertisement business Apple isn't. Just sayin'. They are trying to do it, but they aren't really anywhere near the scale of Google and Facebook. They make money ( lots of money) by selling high-margin hardware, and, to some extent, digital media, on that hardware. Currently, Apple is genuinely serious about preserving user privacy. I realize that can change, in the future, but it's the way…

A full 20% of their profit comes directly from Google Ads, then there's their own ads strewn throughout apps and the App Store on top so their total profit from ads is probably close to a quarter of all their profit.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#196

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Lammy wrote: post #170
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Huh?

We started off talking about Apple isn't in the advertising business, and now we're at standard telemetry.

Upton Sinclair really knew what he was talking about.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#197

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

benoau wrote: post #195
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as they are both in the advertisement business Apple isn't. Just sayin'. They are trying to do it, but they aren't really anywhere near the scale of Google and Facebook. They make money ( lots of money) by selling high-margin hardware, and, to some extent, digital media, on that hardware. Currently, Apple is genuinely serious about preserving user privacy. I realize that can change, in the future, but it's the way…

A full 20% of their profit comes directly from Google Ads, then there's their own ads strewn throughout apps and the App Store on top so their total profit from ads is probably close to a quarter of all their profit.

They still aren't really in the advertising business, though. Google does the advertising, and 20% seems like a pretty big number.

They make, sell, and support physical devices.

That's what's called "classic manufacturing."

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#198

Post by qingcharles »

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…

I mean, the situation is the same for a lot of things now. You must have large social media presence to get any sort of working customer service.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#199

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

ndriscoll wrote: post #132
mariusor wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it's different with GOG? Both GOG and Steam allow you to use local copies of games, and both would deny you access to your account to download more games once banned. Steam allows you to install games without DRM from their platform.

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…

There are some games on GOG that still include DRM. The one I can remember offhand is Cult of the Lamb where the game would only run until a certain milestone at which the copy protection determined the GOG version was pirated and would gate the player from advancing. There were forum posts from the developer confirming this was intended.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#200

Post by gmueckl »

hamdingers wrote: post #143
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…

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. #…

Your post reads like an admission to me that the system is broken. Real persons need real recourse, especially if an adverse action has major impact on their lives.

Could it be that fully automated payment processes are just so fundamentally vulnerable that their very existence needs to be questioned because of how overwhelmed they get with fraud attempts? I'm deliberately being controversial here for the sake of discussion.

Post reply on HN