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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

#241

Post by nehal3m »

Rikudou wrote: post #208
willaaam wrote: post #178

I'm not the biggest advocate of the EU DMA, but account and device access is one item we should actually be regulating very heavily, where potential penalties for (suspected) abuse or incompliance must be much more granular than full-on account bans. It's hard to believe EU governments are actually considering mandating iOS and Android as gateways to access government services. It's a level of ignorance that's unfath…

"I'm not a fan of regulating extremely huge companies, except for the way I'd regulate them."

People make exceptions sometimes, what’s your point?

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

#242

Post by neop1x »

This happened to me as well with a secondary iCloud account, and I still have no idea what triggered the ban. Apple support said they couldn't reverse it. The account was on an old iPhone, and after the ban, it became impossible to log out, rendering the device e-waste overnight. I at least didn't have any valuable data in icloud. But that experience prompted me to stop using Apple products or any other device that requires an online account to function. Fortunately, since recent AMD APUs are quite capable, I sold my MacBook M2 Max and have happily returned to using x86_64 Linux. No more Apple in my life, ever.

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

#243

Post by embedding-shape »

pflenker wrote: post #213
x3sphere wrote: post #32

It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account. But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email…

I don’t mean to defend this, but I know from experience that gift cards are frequently used for money laundring. The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives. At the same time, AML solutions tend to be a closely guarded black box which simply tells you to block a customer, finding out why is pretty difficult. To add more to the problem, some anti money Landry s…

> The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives.

Yes, in many countries they are, but I don't think the laws are dictating Apple to completely turn off the accounts, but instead dictate that Apple should take measures against it.

They could disable those gift card features + Apple wallet/pay if they suspect fraud, and if no one complains within a month, then disable the entire account, rather than start with disabling the account. Would give them space/time to investigate, and wouldn't be a huge pain in the ass when the inevitable false-positives happen, like in this case.

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

#244

Post by willaaam »

Rikudou wrote: post #208
willaaam wrote: post #178

I'm not the biggest advocate of the EU DMA, but account and device access is one item we should actually be regulating very heavily, where potential penalties for (suspected) abuse or incompliance must be much more granular than full-on account bans. It's hard to believe EU governments are actually considering mandating iOS and Android as gateways to access government services. It's a level of ignorance that's unfath…

"I'm not a fan of regulating extremely huge companies, except for the way I'd regulate them."

We must have regulation, and I support that fully. It also seems healthy to me to have an independent view on the specifics of said regulations. I mostly agree with the vision and direction of the DMA, but in my opinion it lacks specificity and clear unacceptable boundaries.

That lack of specificity, to me, is why Apple has been able to implement malicious compliance. At the same time the lack of specifics risks companies leaving the EU market in its entirety due to regulatory unclarity with high fines.

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

#246

Post by ben_w »

pflenker wrote: post #213
x3sphere wrote: post #32

It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account. But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email…

I don’t mean to defend this, but I know from experience that gift cards are frequently used for money laundring. The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives. At the same time, AML solutions tend to be a closely guarded black box which simply tells you to block a customer, finding out why is pretty difficult. To add more to the problem, some anti money Landry s…

Ironically, I had Amazon flag and undo some gift card purchases (of cards, not with cards) that I made for Christmas, while myself thinking about this category of problem, about why cards are a mechanism for scams rather than specifically money laundering.

The cards were to family members that I normally send gift cards to at Christmas, and the activity was counted as "sus" even though I was asked to validate my card number and expiration date before being allowed to make the purchase.

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

#247

Post by tamimio »

That emoji in the last pic felt like passive aggressiveness. I don’t have anything to say but it’s why I never put my eggs in one basket, and essential stuff are always backed up, but if your job is developing in an apple eco system and this scenario happens, it’s basically like getting fired and banned from working ever again!

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

#249

Post by crena »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #66

I've shared your post with a friend at Apple. In the past people have emailed Tim Cook directly - his email id is fairly easy to find. Edit: "I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple, with no success." This doesn't bode well.

This comment should be among the top voted contributions to this submission for everyone to see.

WWDR stands for World-Wide Developer Relations and SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineering.

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

#250

Post by halapro »

ColinWright wrote: post #218

I used to have an eBay account, and at some point, despite not having used it for a year or so, I got an email saying I was permanently banned from eBay. No appeal, no reasons given, no possible way to create another account. Just. Banned. The companies need to be big enough to provide the amazing services they do, but once they are large enough they will never care about individuals. My internal model of large compa…

PayPal permanently blocked my account and all of its connected cards and bank accounts after I sent them my passport for some verification (I don't remember why). It was because a lifetime ago I had opened my PayPal account as a minor.
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