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Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

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Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#271

Post by shaky-carrousel »

TuringNYC wrote: post #242
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.

Honestly you'll be safer if you don't use any major cloud provider for anything valuable. They've proven over and over again that they are very unreliable.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#272

Post by shaky-carrousel »

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. #…

If you don't have the resources to treat your customers like human beings instead of like cattle, you shouldn't be in the business.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#273

Post by lurk2 »

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…

> 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 then pay for gold with stolen credit cards. They could easily keep the money because the trade cannot be reversed without a moderator and what they were doing was against the rules so everyone would just get banned.

Gold farmers were paying for bot memberships using stolen credit cards, which Jagex had to refund along with a chargeback fee.

The blackmail scenario you’re describing wouldn’t make any sense since all of these gold farmers used mule accounts to launder their gold before making the trades. The changes to the trade system were intended to interfere with this laundering so that farming would no longer be profitable.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#274

Post by cycomanic »

rootusrootus wrote: post #246
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.

Apple made 100 billion profit last year. They can surely afford to make this. Just because it would cost them profit does not mean we shouldn't require it.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#276

Post by crazygringo »

bigyabai wrote: post #169
crazygringo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I know the headline you're referencing, but "only digital ecosystem"? I'm pretty sure accounts getting blocked is an issue with all of them. So I don't know what point you're trying to make. It's certainly not like Google is known to be any better.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#277

Post by integralid »

charcircuit wrote: post #216
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…

>Not every one has that kind of public reach to get a satisfactory resolution. You can contact an employee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation

They contacted multiple employees and insiders and nobody was able to help before his blog post was featured oh HN. He was deep in Apple ecosystem and personally knew many people there, from what I understand.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#278

Post by logifail »

I suspect the underlying problem is that the gap between legitimate use of gift cards and fraudulent use of gift cards is just not very large...

Years ago I briefly played around with "manufactured spend" (on credit cards, to earn frequent flyer miles).

There was one specific loophole, with one specific gift card provider, and it was a doozy. You could earn credit card points on spend, plus supermarket loyalty points on spend, by buying gift cards from one specific provider which could be cashed out at face value (ie no fee at all) immediately to a specific type of savings account.

So, of course, world+dog was buying these things like it was the end of the world.

As I sat in a hotel room one evening rubbing the security codes off the latest batch of cards before redeeming them one-by-one into my savings account, it dawned on me that what I was doing was basically indistinguishable from money laundering. Of course it was NOT money laundering, but it would take some time to explain exactly why not...

The loophole was closed relatively quickly, and the gift card provider gave up.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#279

Post by fencepost »

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…

The solution should be obvious to everyone: Just go back to 2008 and start running a large Apple developer conference in your country. If you do that, it should only take a week or two to get your problem resolved.

I'd say also that you should never purchase Apple gift cards from anyone except Apple directly, but if the card itself was tampered with (stolen, opened, scraped and code retrieved, re-covered with generically available scratch-off material, re-sealed, returned to the display) there's nothing keeping that from happening in Apple stores as well.

There is a technical measure that gift card providers could put in place to reduce this, specifically they could block activation of any cards with codes for which they've already started receiving activation/balance checks. There'd still be some risk (thieves would need to wait before testing cards and would have to hope for cards that were purchased but not yet redeemed) but it could be reduced somewhat.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#280

Post by akimbostrawman »

morgan814 wrote: post #260
ndriscoll wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove I take this to mean to sail the seas but I have apprehension over running modified binaries from random people. Is there anything that can be done to alleviate this worry?

the same way you should run _all_ proprietary binaries. restricted inside a sandbox. linux makes that easy with flatpaks.
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