211–220 of 479 posts
Would checking the Apple gift card balance first be a useful precaution? Would it have saved Paris all this hassle? Seems like this might be a necessary step if checking the balance would reveal there's something wrong with the card. Would be frustrating to see the $500 card is worthless but better than risking the bureaucratic hell.
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> But I've had my Google account for 20 years now Just realize this: the longer you play this game, the higher your odds of getting banned. Once it hit me, I quickly decoupled from Google. It's like playing satoshi roulette for 0.5% gains. You keep winning until you get fully wiped.
What do/did you do about other people having your Gmail address as a primary contact?
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…
> If they block/ban/close/suspend a customer account they must provide habeas corpus. * evidence "Habeas corpus" is not a lofty expression for evidence, although people sometimes use it as such. It's a procedure for challenging one's detention before a court.
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…
They covered this a lot on the Accidental Tech Podcast last night. I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards-- at least, not if they can't be redeemed safely. I'm sure people would run other kinds of scams with AppleIDs without the existence of gift cards, but gift card redemption scams have gotta be 99% of the reason people create fake accounts. The support burden would ev…
If they're anything like Starbucks then they get the benefit of utilizing the unredeemed balances as temporary capital for investments. It's an interest free loan at their scale. Plus they get to keep the balance that people forget to redeem.
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…
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…
You can contact an employee.
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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?
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I know you're just trying to pull something out of thin air that sounds plausible, but...this would be simple to prove with a request for valid death certificates, marriage license, and a birth certificate to prove you were married, the child is yours, and that both are in fact deceased. Oh, and of course, you'll have to prove who you are as well.
Given the (rightful) outcry about handing out your IDs to private corporations in "safety"'s name, are you really suggesting providing documents even more specific about you? We're all worried about identity fraud, and such documents are actually used to apply for an id in some countries!
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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."
Nobody would say they aren't in the PC, tablet or audio business, yet they make more off ads than they do off Macs, iPads, headphones, speakers... everything but iPhone.
I spent most of my career in the hardware business. It's really odd to see so many folks unable to understand business models that make money, besides "sell data."
It really seems as if folks can't grok that companies that make money, can do so without necessarily selling data.
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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 h…
I can't even get into my Google account even though I have the username, password and recovery email, and all the emails are CC'd to the recovery email, because Google turned on 2FA without any notice and it needs a text from a number I no longer own.