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Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

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Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#241

Post by benced »

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…

This legislation has high costs and while it seems fair to impose them on the Apples and Googles of the world, this gets weirder with smaller services that might have trouble complying. My podcast player, Overcast (overcast.fm), is one guy. Should he be subject to this? It seems like that business might not be able to exist if he was.

You could do a revenue threshold or something but seems tricky.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#242

Post by TuringNYC »

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…

This article alone is grounds for me to never, ever use Apple gift cards -- just by virtue of all the personal photos, etc that I've entrusted to iCloud.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#243

Post by jmward01 »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #139
jmward01 wrote: post #91

A core concept here is that of ownership. People think they own their accounts and data. Stories like these, and unfortunately the law, make it clear that they don't own anything. I personally think it is false advertising of companies to even hint at ownership. Words like 'buy' shouldn't be allowed since it implies owning. They should only be allowed to say 'rent' or 'grant a limited license'.

I would rather the law make it such that you really are buying , than codify that you own nothing. The ambiguity isn't great, on that we agree, but why would you weaken the citizen's standing to remove it?

I want a tech shift to allow this concept. Ownership will require me to physically maintain my own data, or at least have the ability to do so. I really want personal cloud capabilities so that services like iTunes and others are required to be able to use my own personal, and completely independently maintained, storage. That way I could either self host or contract out but then Apple would loose their vendor lock-in and services like iTunes would be forced to play nicer. The core problem is the iCloud lock-in/bundling. If I were looking at anti-trust breakup I would start with this idea, forcing alternative cloud storage options.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#244

Post by mrguyorama »

notatoad wrote: post #181

I understand why Apple sells gift cards. I understand why brick and mortar stores sell gift cards for third parties like Apple. But what do the credit card companies get out of this arrangement? It seems like they’re taking on a whole lot of unnecessary risk and enabling these scams by allowing third party gift cards to be purchased using a credit card.

Hello,

I work for a major gift card company. These views are my own and not that of my employer.

The credit card companies take zero risk in this transaction, because we, the company selling the gift card, take the risk.

To this end, my personal job is building systems to prevent and combat credit card fraud. It's not terribly complicated in fact. The team I originally started with a decade ago was like three people.

Every gift card purchased by a stolen credit card is a direct loss to our revenue. We strongly want to keep that amount small. We do a pretty good job of it.

We have a large department of REAL HUMANS you can call to get help with your gift card. In the past, they have had very upset grandmas calling in to ask about why they can't purchase iTunes gift cards because they need them to get their nephew out of prison. Those calls are very sad.

Physical gift cards have no value until you pay the cashier. Despite this, physical gift card security is tough. The plastic card has to be shipped out and sit on a shelf and be directly available to anyone to tamper with. We have made some efforts to reduce that threat, but there isn't much we can do.

If you are in the US you have absolutely used our company's products and if you have bought a gift card online there's a 90% chance your transaction details have run through my code.

Frankly, I do not understand why Apple would have banned an account for trying to redeem a scammed or tampered with card. That doesn't make any sense.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#245

Post by Eisenstein »

hamdingers wrote: post #163
masfuerte wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But 'it's hard' is not an excuse. If it is not possible to honor the contract that you create with the user because of fraudsters, then the user should not have to abide by it either.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#246

Post by rootusrootus »

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…

This does not scale, the amount of abuse is huuuuge. But I think with a prerequisite, it could:

Companies should be required to provide access to a service that verifies identity. I know such companies exist, so it is doable. And then, once it is provable that they are dealing with an actual human who can be identified, your rules can be applied.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#247

Post by xpe »

I offer some metaphors bundled into a claim:

Silver bullets almost never beat fraud. Better to steel yourself for a never-ending grind against a horde of nameless adversaries.

I asked Gemini for some follow-ups, and lo! they are interesting to consider:

- "fraud is an evolutionary arms race fought in the trenches."

- "fraud is a siege where the attacker has infinite attempts, and the defender must succeed every time."

- "fighting fraud is not a battle, it is industrial waste management."

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#248

Post by SXX »

kmfrk wrote: post #125
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…

There's also grey areas with Steam like when you buy a Steam key for a game outside of Steam through places like GreenManGaming and get your reviews discounted or otherwise flagged arbitrarily based on an opaque authenticity heuristic. https://www.greenmangaming.com

Valve get no fees from non-Steam key sales and developers can really request any reasonable amount of keys so tens and hundreds of thousands.

It make a lot of sense to discount all these reviews to avoid abuse. A lot of developers would abuse reviews hard otherwise.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#249

Post by Nextgrid »

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…

Apple became infected with the same thirst for "engagement" as any advertising-driven company. That's why even first-party apps like Maps or Music now waste your time with bullshit notifications. Same for every OS update trying to con you into enabling Apple "Intelligence".

Whether the advertising is ultimately successful does not matter to those people, what matters is if they can convince the person paying them (the manager paying their salary, the ad agency, etc) that they are effective.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#250

Post by lozf »

xp84 wrote: post #96
dylan604 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Assume everything is encrapified with “strong” DRM unless credibly demonstrated otherwise.

"encrapsulated"
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