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

311–320 of 479 posts

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#311

Post by asadotzler »

rootusrootus wrote: post #281
cycomanic wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For Apple, yes, but in the context of rules that apply across the board we should address the scaling issue. People who've had to deal with the filth of the Internet know how hard the problem is to solve, and not everyone has Apple money.

If you can't charge your customers enough to spend enough on this challenge, you don't really have a viable business, you've got a theft organization. Externalizing your failure to build a solid business by screwing customers is not okay.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#312

Post by quesera »

wishfish wrote: post #202
eddyg wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this exact thought. Unfortunately I can't find a way to check the balance of an Apple gift card without signing in to an Apple ID⁽¹⁾. So maybe you need a throwaway Apple ID... ⁽¹⁾ https://support.apple.com/en-us/108111

I guess a throwaway account would be essential then. That's a little weird to require an ID just to check the balance.

It's an anti-fraud measure.

Scammers will sniff card info before activation, and poll the balance check site to see when the card is activated. They will then use the card to get merchandise which they ship to another market and sell for ~50-60% of retail value.

Like solar power, money laundering is inefficient, but it's valuable when the source material is zero-cost.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#313

Post by asadotzler »

estimator7292 wrote: post #15
DannyPage wrote: post #14

> Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obvi…

Banks frequently completely freeze accounts for no discernable reason and with zero communication, support, or recourse. You're just lucky that it hasn't happened to you. That does not mean it doesn't happen to anyone.

Banks are well regulated and will face meaningful consequences for getting this wrong with any regularity.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#314

Post by hrdwdmrbl »

Unfortunately, at the moment, for normal people, the legal system is our only option.

I am not a lawyer, but I have done this multiple times:

Read the T&C and search for "dispute" or "dispute resolution". Look for what you're supposed to do when you have a dispute. Follow the steps as outlined. Corporate lawyers generally take things seriously.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#315

Post by WorldMaker »

DannyPage wrote: post #14

> Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obvi…

On the subject of (1) I wonder if a complication in this specific case might be a variant of the clbuttic Scunthorpe problem that the last name on the account that redeemed a bad gift card included the word "Butt" and an algorithm or underpaid reviewer (or both) flagged it also as a suspiciously named account.

(2) and (3) remain great questions without enough good answers.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#316

Post by asadotzler »

tiffanyh wrote: post #34

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…

You seem to be positing that retailers have not option but to issue gift cards and then deal with massive fraud. That's silly. How about not offering gift cards in the first place if you cannot manage the associated fraud without fucking over your customers?

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#317

Post by secstate »

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?

It's not a great solution, but you can vote with your wallet and simply not partake in that form of entertainment. I can't say it's fun to be not up on current games, or to find indie/non-drm games to play. But piracy is just an end-around a terribly policy of non-ownership that manages to both not remunerate the folks who do the work and make no impact on the actual problem which is that we don't like the non-ownership clause in modern games.

So yeah, TLDR, vote with your wallet and give up the entertainment this time.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#318

Post by bonsai_spool »

asadotzler wrote: post #313
estimator7292 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks frequently completely freeze accounts for no discernable reason and with zero communication, support, or recourse. You're just lucky that it hasn't happened to you. That does not mean it doesn't happen to anyone.

Banks are well regulated and will face meaningful consequences for getting this wrong with any regularity.

> Banks [...] will face meaningful consequences for getting this wrong with any regularity

That's false, unfortunately. There's amazing levels of discretion that banks enjoy and minimal accountability to end users. The CFPB (in the USA, anyway) was a countermeasure but has been recently weakened.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#319

Post by quesera »

mrguyorama wrote: post #244
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.…

Thanks for the program management perspective.

Most consumers are blissfully unaware (as they should be!) of the complexities of ordinary payments transactions, never mind the even-weirder world of closed loop prepaid debit.

Re: Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

#320

Post by tokyotexture »

akimbostrawman wrote: post #280
morgan814 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That only goes so far though. A lot of games need internet access, so essentially you are running potentially modified binaries running on your hardware/network, that gets access to the outside. Sure, blast radius becomes somewhat limited, but you still have a potential problem.
Post reply on HN