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

hey.paris

331–340 of 1001 posts

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

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards You'd think so. Yet, the stories of PayPal locking up payouts to surprised people keep coming every year - and people still use them.

> You'd think so. Yet, the stories of PayPal locking up payouts to surprised people keep coming every year - and people still use them. At least in Europe, PayPal is a regulated bank which means you can hand the case over to the authorities and they can and will help you out.

They aren’t regulated as a bank in the US, where they have a much lighter-touch type of licensing.

Do the bank regulators in Europe typically help effectively when PayPal freezes an account?

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

#332
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would my government care less about me than a multinational corporation with billions of customers that isn't headquartered or listed where I live? My Member of Parliament represents about 130,000 people, does regular door knocking to talk to people, and has a staffed office a few km away the I can walk into anytime I want. None of that applies to a multinational corporation.

Because you can’t get rid of your government, whilst you can easily stop buying apple crap.

People can vote the government out on the next election but they can't vote Tim Cook and other executives out of Apple unless they're shareholders with significant voting powers.

And don't tell me to "vote with my wallet". We're talking about Big Tech, not your next door kebab shop.

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

#333
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dis…

> 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. You misunderstand the nature of financial regulation. The laws on things like money laundering are intentionally vague, they say things like "Apple should take measures against it". And financial regulators will not come out and say (especially in writing) that you MUST do…

> Because the financial regulators have the ability to simply close down your business

You misunderstand how business regulation works in free countries. Financial regulators can't just "simply close down your business" however they want, unless you live in a country that is primarily authoritarian.

Again, I'm not saying closing down accounts isn't easier than turning of functionality, but companies could chose the "harder route" if they did care about the users themselves. Alas, most companies priority remains "make more money above all".

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

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, gift cards seem to be popular with consumers. I regularly see people in line at the supermarket, buying gift cards. I notice, because it’s a discrete workflow, that stands out. I doubt they are all feeding scammers. I think that charities often solicit gift cards.

I'm sure they're not all scammers, but what's the upside to the consumer? Why not just give the money directly? Seems to me like all the upside is on the company, and all the risk is on the user.

The theory is that if you give someone cash, they're just going to put it in the bank or buy gas with it, but if you give them gift card to e.g. a game store then they're going to buy a game, without you having to know which game they want.

It's the same premise as buying someone any gift instead of just giving them the money so they can buy whatever they want.

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

#336
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably they tried a real operating system.

Linux and the other unices are great for their CLI, but GUIs seem more like an afterthought on that side.

I find KDE Plasma to be much better than Windows and MacOS.

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

#337
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great victim blaming there buddy.

To what extent is the victim their own perpetrator? They allow the status quo to succeed by endorsing it. They voted for this with $30,000 of their own money, and they will likely vote again.

So taking a wrong turn should result in you being mugged, raped and subsequently killed because apparently there was some "safe", but less convenient, passage? You're not helping OSS by making claims like these.

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

#338

This is one of the worst stories I’ve seen yet. It sounds like they were “all in” on Apple with zero backups, which shows some questionable judgment, but still, this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.) Maybe hosts should be required to mail you a hard drive with your data on it when th…

> It sounds like they were “all in” on Apple with zero backups, which shows some questionable judgment

iCloud literally encourages users to opt for storing originals only in the cloud. It's marketed as such, it nags you about this every now and then, and iCloud is the preinstalled default cloud storage on every iPhone. Consider non-techies dealing with this too.

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

#339
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great victim blaming there buddy.

read the TOS before agreeing

And then what? Go to Google, Samsung, any other Android vendor and read the same TOS?

There should be laws to protect people, instead of blaming victims.

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

#340

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."

Wow, imagine living in a world not being black and white. Crazy!
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